


but the ice don't melt in mid december

by otachi



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Friends to Enemies, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-04-18 00:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14201017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otachi/pseuds/otachi
Summary: Jared never forgives Evan after The Connor Project. It makes things awful hard when Evan transfers to the same college as him in sophomore year.(or: the obligatory friends to enemies to friends to lovers fic)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ‘I say, you do have a heart!’  
> ‘Sometimes,’ he replied. ‘When I have the time.’  
> — Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

Sometimes Evan’s angry about the way everything turned out. He knows just how awful the things he did were, because when he thinks about it objectively, starts using phrases like ‘lied about being friends with a boy who killed himself’ and ‘lied to a grieving family’ and ‘lied to a sister who finally thought that she might be able to one day forgive her brother’ he feels sick to his stomach. But _Jared_ doesn’t deserve to feel bitter, really. It’s not like any of that stuff affected him, not like he ever really tried to stop Evan. He remembers Jared pawning off badges like he hadn’t told Connor he looked like a school shooter the day he killed himself. Maybe Jared hadn’t been as embroiled in it all as Evan, and that’s fair, but Jared hadn’t exactly been a good person either. That’s why it had stung so much when he realised that he and Jared weren’t friends anymore, and weren’t ever going to be again.

Evan had always assumed that Jared’s friendship wouldn’t last, because the older he got the more distant he seemed, and Evan’s never been the guy to reach out to people, always too afraid of rejection to try - but he hadn’t expected it to end like this. He’d thought they’d just gradually drift apart. Maybe they’d text once in a while, maybe in college when they were both a little older and a little less self-absorbed they’d meet up for coffee or something. Instead Jared’s last words to him had been ‘ _Fuck you, Evan. Asshole_ ’, and it's a line that he plays over and over and over again on a loop in his head.

If he lets himself think about it, properly, which he doesn’t often (because it hurts and because he knows nostalgia is a dirty liar,) he thinks it hurt more than the stuff with Zoe. More than Alana, more than his mom, even, because Jared knew all the worst parts of him, and he’d stayed anyway. He’d known it wasn’t built to last but - god, he’d hoped. It was proof that he could be known and still loved, or something like it. Some semblance of ‘cared for’.

Now he’s not so sure, and he _hates_ Jared for it, because he still doesn’t really understand why it happened.

 

* * *

 

Evan works at Pottery Barn for a year, after he finished high school. It’s a shitty job, and it involves way too much talking to people for his liking, but it’s probably helped his anxiety a bit. He doesn’t _enjoy_ it, even on a good day, but he manages, and by the end of the year he feels a little less guilty about the fact that he’s starting college in the fall.

He makes friends, sort of. There’s a cashier named Kendall who he usually eats lunch with. She’s got the kind of bitter, world-weary attitude he’s come to expect from retail workers. He can’t blame them, really, because he’s only been working for a year and he already kind of hates people in general. Lunch is the only time Kendall really gets to drop the whole faux-cheerfulness shtick, and she revels in being able to complain about just how incapable the general public seems to be. Evan usually just listens, because he likes to do things that don’t require interaction with the public, like restocking shelves and loitering around the parts of the store he knows are usually the least busy. He has less horror stories to share, and he doesn’t envy her a bit.

Josh works there too, but he’s, like, 21, and Evan always feels a little off-kilter when they talk. They’re probably friends, or something like it, but Josh is always just a little distant, and he looks at Evan like he’s a particularly interesting equation, sometimes. It’s weird. Kendall agrees, because for some reason she’s decided she likes Evan, and, she confesses to him one lunch break, over a salami sandwich and a pack of salt and vinegar chips, he _definitely_ hit on her on her first day of work, and it was super weird. That’s what she says, at least, and frankly Evan has no reason to doubt she’s telling the truth.

There are other people who work there, too, obviously, but Kendall and Joshua are the people he sees the most - Josh because they usually work the same area, and Kendall because they always take their breaks at the same time. They have a group chat on Facebook where they complain about their store manager. He and Kendall have a separate one where they complain about Josh.

It’s kind of nice to have friends again, especially ones who don’t know about his baggage. He doesn’t have to worry about them judging him. Or at least not for the things he’s done in the past.

“Excited about college?” Kendall asks, bumping his shoulder and quirking an eyebrow at him.

“Sure,” Evan says.

Kendall gives him a look, and Evan knows he doesn’t sound half as excited as he probably should do, but - well.

“Jared goes there,” he says, and Kendall’s face shutters.

Evan hasn’t told her everything, because there’s just… so much to it all, but she knows that they were best friends for years, and now they kind of hate each other. Evan’s pretty sure Jared’s taken to vaguing about him on Twitter now, but he generally tries to avoid looking. They don’t even talk anymore. He doesn’t understand why they can’t just stoically disregard each other or whatever.

“Ah,” Kendall says.

She stares at the floor for a beat, before directing her gaze towards him, and Evan knows she’s going to try and comfort him. Beneath it all she’s actually a pretty nice person, but he _really_ doesn’t need to think about Jared anymore than he has today, thank you very much, so he just shakes his head at her. She drops the subject.

“I’ll miss you here,” she says, resigned, “I don’t know how the fuck I’m gonna put up with Josh for another year. Especially if whoever they’re hiring on to replace you is as much of a disaster as Clara was.”

Clara, Kendall’s explained before, was the girl who worked his shift before him. Apparently Kendall had been the one to show her the ropes, and she’d been insufferable. Evan’s just glad Kendall’s actually taken a liking to him.

“It’s okay,” Evan says, “you know you can, there’s always Facebook.”  
  
“That there is,” Kendall says, and he likes to think it means she’s forgiven him for leaving her to the wolves.

 

* * *

 

It’s not that Evan’s scared about the fact that he and Jared are going to be attending the same college. He’s sort of gotten over that side of things - it’s been over a year now, since they fell out, and Jared had glared at him enough for the duration of their senior year that his wrath doesn’t bother Evan now (or he hopes it doesn’t at least, because it’s been a long time since they’ve actually crossed paths). He’s more just frustrated. He knows why he has to stay close to home, knows why he’s never really had an option as far as college choice goes, and he can’t resent his mom for their circumstances, but he does kind of hate Jared for not moving away when he had the chance.

He hates Jared for a lot of reasons, nowadays, and that’s the problem. He’s not sure how he’s going to respond to Evan being there, and Evan doesn’t know how he’s going to respond to seeing Jared again. He doesn’t even know what kind of person Jared is anymore.

He’s transferring into second-year, had worked up enough credits at the community college that they’d just about let him, and that’s kind of terrifying too. He’s staying at home for the year, because accommodation on campus is expensive and also kind of unnecessary, given that Evan can just get the bus, and that’s probably a good thing even if his mom’s worried that he’s going to be missing out on the ‘university experience’, whatever that’s meant to be.

As far as he’s aware (though he avoids checking Jared’s social media unless it’s a really bad night, in which case he loses all self control and does it as a weird self-flagellation type thing,) Jared’s in his second year, studying engineering, or comp sci, or something like that. Alana’s mentioned him a couple of times, because while she and Evan aren’t exactly close they’ve kept up a frosty sort of correspondence since he apologised. He thinks she’s starting to warm up to him, but then she’s at some Ivy League university out of state, so she only knows as much as he posts on Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever. Evan never asks after him, so he doesn’t know why she bothers with the occasional updates, but it does give him an idea as to what he’s getting into.

 

* * *

 

Evan doesn’t see Jared at all for the first week he’s at college. It’s an unexpected boon, because it’s not like the college campus is particularly big, and all the science subjects tend to share a lot of the same lecture halls. Evan’s studying ecology.

Kendall pesters him for updates, and Evan texts her dramatic recitals of the stuff he sees going on. Most of it isn’t particularly exciting, really, but it’s nice that she’s trying to keep in touch.

Evan’s not sure he’s making friends, really, but he’s talked to a handful of people, has a good ten new Facebook friends at least, and he feels like he might actually be doing okay with the whole socialising thing. The lecture halls the ecology majors use have two levels of seating, and Evan likes to sit at the very back of the upper level, in an attempt to avoid having to meet anyone’s gaze, or answer any questions. There’s a boy named Dustin who seemed to share a similar interest in staying unnoticeable, and they’ve struck up a weird camaraderie. Atif sits with them too, though he claims it’s just because it’s quieter up there.

He gets coffee with Kendall on Saturday, near campus because she insisted that he give her a grand tour, even though Evan knows he’s just going to walk her past a few bland looking buildings.

She makes them sit next to the window, because she’s convinced that they’re going to see Jared, and she wants to be able to stick her middle finger up at him, apparently. Evan’s tried to explain that there’s no reason why Jared would be around and not, like, in his dorm or whatever, but Kendall insisted. Evan’s also tried to explain that actually he’d rather not seek out Jared and deliberately annoy him. That was also a no go, because Kendall’s decided that he’s just not angry enough, and that Jared needs to know that Evan has people on his side. Evan’s not sure why she’s turning it into a whole thing, when realistically Jared’s forgotten all about him now and it was just a falling out between high schoolers, but she’s always liked a grudge.

Evan gets a hot chocolate, because he still doesn’t really like coffee and he’s gotten over the fear of being considered childish for ordering it. Kendall gets some kind of matcha thing, which Evan wrinkles his nose at.

He’s picking absentmindedly at a piece of caramel shortbread, Kendall telling him about how Joshua’s decided to revolutionise the bedding section of the store and is doing an absolutely pathetic job of it, when he sees him through the window. He averts his gaze as quickly as he can, tenses up just a bit because seeing Jared again wasn’t meant to hurt but has sent a weird stabbing pain through his chest anyway. Kendall notices, and squints at him.

She turns to look out of the window, and Evan realises he probably could have handled things better.

It’s not like Jared really stands out as a person, so there’s no reason for Kendall to know it’s him walking by except for the fact that she likes to stalk his Instagram and tell Evan that he’s actually super ugly, kind of, and that Evan could do so much better anyway. He thinks Kendall’s built up their relationship in her head a little, but she’s not easily swayed so he lets her believe in her weird fantasy. It’s not been a problem until now.

“That’s him, right?” she asks, quietly, glaring daggers at him even before Evan’s answered in the affirmative.

He’s resolutely staring past Kendall’s head at the wall instead of joining her staring out of the window, though it’s admittedly taking most of his self control not to. Kendall sticks her middle finger up and Evan takes a deep breath and hopes with all his heart that Jared hasn’t noticed. Maybe Evan’s changed hugely, somehow, maybe Jared won’t recognise him (he would, if he say him, because Evan hasn’t changed much at all). Maybe he’ll assume Kendall’s trying to insult someone else, even if her glare is directly quite squarely towards him. Maybe he’ll just write it off as Evan being kind of petty, and move on with his life, and it won’t have to be a whole thing.

“He’s calling me an asshole,” Kendall says. “I think that’s what he’s saying at least. I’m kind of bad at lip-reading. Or - no, wait, I think that was meant for you actually. Do you think he thinks you put me up to this? I’m gonna tell him to fuck off.”

“Please don’t do that,” Evan starts to say, closing his eyes and sighing.

The apologetic glance Kendall send his way when he next looks at her tells him she probably already has.

Evan makes the mistake of glancing out the window, after that, because he suddenly _has_ to know what Jared’s doing. He has to know if this is going to be anything more than a horrible one-off event they can both forget about in a month.

Jared’s looking at him. Evan grimaces, but can’t quite force himself to look away. It’s like people always talk about watching a car crash, but really it feels more like he’s the one driving the car, headfirst into a wall.

Jared looks lost, if Evan had to put a name to it - or he does for maybe five seconds, before his expression goes blank, and he gives Evan a look that’s pure venom.

Evan’s not sure how he feels, really. It’s hard to say. His chest feels tight, and his stomach heavy, and there’s a buzzing in his head that’s making it hard to think. Anger is the easiest, he thinks, and anger’s what Jared deserves, because this isn’t just about The Connor Project, it’s about the years of distance, the insults, the way Jared made him feel like a burden he’d never wanted and never asked for and he’s _allowed_ to feel angry for that.

He levels a glare straight back at him, and thinks about graves and how he’s just dug his own.

Evan’s the first one to look away.

He turns to Kendall, and takes a sip of his hot chocolate, and says, quite calmly, “he’s going to ruin my life.”

“He’s not,” Kendall says. “We’re going to ruin his.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from o my heart, by mother mother. unbeta'd. irregular updates
> 
> hey. i didn't really think i'd end up starting another multi-chapter fic while still working on easy to reach, but some stuff's come up that's made working on that fic in particular kind of hard lately. btidmimd is the result of that (and it's a horrible acronym, i know). that said, i'm pretty excited about this fic. i hope other people are too


	2. Chapter 2

The good thing about college, Evan quickly comes to realise, is that most of the time he doesn’t have to be there. He can go to his lectures, and his practicals, and whatever else they ask him to, and then he can go home. If he has free time between lectures he hides out in the library, where he knows Jared’s won’t be (because Jared had always hated working at school, had always been able to focus better in his own space, and Evan hates the fact that he still remembers things like that). If he needs to eat lunch he’ll get something with his coursemates, so that even if Jared is around he has enough of a barrier that he’s sure he won’t bother trying to start anything.

It makes avoiding him a lot easier than he’d thought it would be. He’d known he was exaggerating things when he’d been talking to Kendall, but he really had thought Jared would be more of a problem. Not that he isn’t a problem.

Jared seems determined to catch Evan’s attention, on the rare days he’s unable to slip away unnoticed, mainly by glaring at him whenever he passes by, or loudly complaining about ‘this guy he used to know’ whenever he’s in hearing range. Evan, to his credit, tries to ignore him. It’s not that he isn’t angry too, not that he doesn’t want to retort, and lash out, and remind Jared he has absolutely no right to be doing this. It’s just not worth it.

It was reasonably low key at first - presumably Jared was testing the waters, trying to gauge Evan’s reaction (nonexistent - or that’s what he’s been aiming for) - but he’s stepped things up since it’s become clear that he’s not going to get called out on it. It’s gotten to the point where Atif's picked up on it (and Dustin probably has too, though he’s harder to read), and Evan’s spent the last few days preparing himself for the conversation he knows is coming.

“So what’s up and you with that one kid?” Atif tries, gesturing with his hands, “like - this tall, glasses, always looks at you like you’ve killed a small animal in front of him - what’s that about?”

Evan grimaces, and Dustin shoots him a concerned look. He picks at his nachos and tries to think of a way to explain that doesn’t sound over-dramatic and spiteful.

“He was - we were best friends for like, a really long time. And then in high school he decided to try, he wanted to be popular. And I wasn’t, obviously. So I guess we just, uh, drifted? And he kept, every time we talked or whatever he’d just remind me, he’d say we were just _family_ friends, that that was different to normal friends, we weren’t actually, you know, whatever. And then I started talking to other people, and doing things without him, and he got mad about it.”

It’s not the full story (or even most of it), and neither Atif nor Dustin are oblivious enough to the very obvious cues Evan gives when he’s stretching the truth to have missed that, but presumably they’ve decided that it’s probably close enough to the way things actually played out to let it go.

“He sounds like a massive douchebag,” Dustin says, dipping a fry in his milkshake.

“He was,” Evan says. Jared was an ass even before they’d had the fight, except back then it hadn’t really mattered, because they’d been friends (or Jared had been Evan’s friend, at least).

“Do you - should we be doing something about this, do you think?” Atif asks, like he genuinely cares. “I don’t mean, like, reporting him or anything, because as far as I know all he does is give you dirty looks and say stupid things about you, but, like. Do we throw eggs at his room or something?”

“Oh for real,” Dustin says, “like I am totally onboard with that. I’ve never egged anything before. How bad do you think it hurts? Like, being hit by an egg. Just theoretically.”

Evan’s not quite sure how to express his appreciation for these people, these barely-friends who already seem so much more on his side than Jared ever did. He wonders if this is how it's meant to be, if what he’d had with Jared had just been some pale imitation of actual friendship.

He thinks about the years they’d spent together, the hours Jared had spent with him sat on the floor of one of the high school toilet blocks, talking and talking and talking until Evan stopped hyperventilating, and he thinks - no. It was just different.

 

* * *

 

Alana messages him on Facebook. It’s not unusual, but she still has these moments where Evan can tell she’s trying very, very hard not to be angry with him (which is fair), so it’s still kind of terrifying. There’s no sudden rush of relief when he actually opens the message either.

 **Alana Beck** **  
** Hi, Evan. Jared’s vaguing about you on Twitter again.

 **Evan Hansen  
** is it bad?

 **Alana Beck** ****  
Define ‘bad’.  
It’s very obviously about you, and it’s not exactly polite, if that’s what you mean. So it’s pretty bad, I’d say.

Evan stares at the phone in his hands. If he hits the keys a little harder than he usually does, nobody notices.

 **Evan Hansen** ****  
ok. great  
  
**Alana Beck** **  
** Sorry, Evan. I know it’s not like you want to hear it, and I honestly wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, but he’s just been getting worse lately. I was worried something might have happened on campus.

 **Evan Hansen**  
just the usual. i appreciate you looking out for me, really alana  
but, just. i don’t know  
i don’t think it’s necessary, really, unless he says something super bad? or if he uses my full name or something, then maybe, i wouldn’t want that on the internet  
but otherwise it’s just him talking at nobody about nothing basically  
  
**Alana Beck**  
Okay.  
I know we haven’t spoken that much recently, but I do consider you a friend, even after everything that happened. I don’t forgive you yet, I don’t think, but the whole thing with Jared is...  
It’s unnecessary. So, I don’t know. I suppose if there were sides I’d be on yours.  
That’s all.

It’s not what Evan had been expecting. In all honesty he thought Alana had more reason to still be angry with him than Jared - she’d actually cared about The Connor Project. What they’d been doing had meant something to her and Evan had - well. Ruined it.

He’s reminded again that Alana is a genuinely good person.

 **Evan Hansen**  
thank you  
like, really that means a lot  
i’ll  
if it’s okay i’ll message you again soon? i sort of didn’t want to in case you were still  
in case you like, didn’t want me talking to you  
but if it’s okay i will. you’re my friend too  
  
**Alana Beck**  
Of course, Evan.

 

* * *

 

On Thursday Evan’s passed a note. He’s in a lecture on biodiversity, sat, as always, at the back of the hall, alongside Dustin and Atif, and has been trying valiantly to keep up with what the lecturer’s saying. His notes are a mess, because Evan’s kind of the worst at figuring out which parts of the talk are meant to be the important bits. He just writes down everything that’s said until he inevitably starts falling behind, at which point he’ll just stop mid-sentence and start all over again, hoping, this time, that he’ll be able to keep up.

The note says, in all caps, ‘ _CAN YOU JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE_ ’.

It’s from Jared, then, Evan thinks. Why Jared felt the need to convey this particular message to Evan, and in the middle of his lecture, when he hasn’t said so much as a word to Jared since he started studying here, he isn’t sure. It’s a little rich, really. Evan’s _purposefully_ been avoiding him.

Jared’s the one who’s always trying to start things, making incendiary comments like Evan hasn’t been hearing his stupid quips for years. Sure, there’s an edge to them now that there never was before, but it’s not like Evan hadn’t been expecting that.

Dustin peers over his shoulder and scrunches up his face into an expression Evan thinks is one of distaste. Or anger, maybe - either way it's something he doesn’t usually see from him.

“Have you even done anything?” he asks Evan, in hushed tones.

“Not as far as I’m aware.”

Dustin and Atif exchange a look.

“This is kind of ridiculous,” Atif says, “and I know the whole egg thing was mostly a joke, but if you actually want to do something about it we’ve got your back.”

“It’s fine,” Evan says. “My friend - I’ve mentioned, I think I’ve talked about Kendall before - she’s sort of decided that this is, like, her thing now? Defending me from Jared, I mean. Even though he’s not really doing all that much. So I don’t know, I’m not entirely sure what she’s done, but I presume this is because of her? Somehow? We were getting coffee last weekend and she called him an asshole through the window. And I think she’s been stalking his Twitter, uh, another one of my friends, she, apparently he was talking about me the other day? And I think Kendall follows probably, like, all of his social media, actually. On fake accounts.”

“That’s a lot,” Dustin says, “just, generally. Is it, like, okay with you? That she’s doing this?”

Evan looks away.

It’s not, really. If he had his way he’d just spend the two years he has here ignoring everything to do with Jared. Presumably after a good few months of insulting Evan and receiving absolutely no reaction Jared would give up, and they could both just get on with their lives. But Kendall’s trying to help, and it’s sweet that she’s willing to go out of her way to argue on Evan’s behalf (even if it is at least partially just because she likes to argue, and even if she probably wouldn’t be doing any of this if she actually knew about what Evan had done - but he doesn’t like to think about that part).

Evan can’t really afford to lose one of the only friends he has anymore.

“It’s fine,” Evan says again.

Atif frowns, but doesn’t say anything. Dustin gives him a thumbs up.  
  
“I’ll, I’m going to message her later today,” Evan says, “Kendall, I mean, so. If she says anything I’ll let you know? Unless you don’t want me to.”

“What, no way, man,” Dustin says, probably too loudly considering they’re in the middle of a lecture. “I need to know what’s going on. I want all of the details. Do you know how dead my social life is now term’s started again? This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in weeks, and I’m not even involved.”

 

* * *

 

“What have you done?” Evan asks Kendall as she takes the seat across from him, matcha latte in hand.

He hadn’t really wanted to have the whole conversation (and potential argument, he’d prepared for all possibilities,) over text, or via Facebook messages or whatever, so he’s put off bringing up the note (or The Note, as Dustin’s taken to calling it in their ecology group chat, which really only consists of him, Evan and Atif,) until now.

They aren’t on campus this time, or really anywhere nearby at all, which is a nice change of pace, and something Evan had vehemently insisted on. He _is_ drinking hot chocolate again though, and Kendall’s still glancing out of the window every few seconds, like Jared will have followed him all the way to a dinky little coffee shop just to glare at him from the sidewalk, so there’s a weird sort of symmetry to the whole thing.

“Hi, Evan, nice to see you too,” Kendall says. “How’s university treating you? Me, I’ve been great. I so love working with Josh. I’m having the time of my life.” She doesn’t sound half as sarcastic as she usually does when making snide remarks, which Evan takes to mean that she has most definitely done _something_.

“What have you done, Kendall?” He tries again.

“Look,” she says, easily. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just going to keep track of his tweets or whatever, and maybe, like, I don’t know. Encourage a load of Twitter bots to harass him. But he just kept saying stuff! I was just, it was so annoying. He’s so annoying.”

It’s not an answer.

“That’s, you’re not answering the question,” Evan says, and he can hear the slight quiver in his voice that means he’s stressed enough that it’s actually starting to show. He stares at the table, and fists his hands into his polo, and reminds himself that she’s only trying to help. He should never have brought Jared up to her in the first place.

“I’m sorry, Evan,” Kendall says, “it’s not like I did much. I just messaged him saying I wanted to talk, and that I was your friend, and I guess he figured out who I was pretty quickly because he was _not_ happy. So I gave him a piece of my mind. It wasn’t - I didn’t say anything bad, not properly, and I told him I was doing this for myself and not for you, ‘cause you just wanted to ignore him, so he shouldn’t - I didn’t think there’d be a problem. Is there a problem?”

Evan hands her the note, creased and slightly torn from spending a day crushed under his textbooks. It’s still very much readable.

“Um. I may also have, like, made a burn account. Like, to insult him. A bot. It posts, like, twice a day. And it mentions his Twitter handle.”

“Christ, Kendall,” Evan says. “Why would you, I don’t - you had to know that this would upset me. That I wouldn’t, that this wasn’t what I wanted. I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, Evan,” Kendall says again, quietly.  
  
Evan knows she means it, but at the same time he just - he doesn’t need this. He really, really doesn’t, he just needs to get through his course, and graduate with a degree, and then get a good job, so his mom doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life working herself to the bone just to give him the chance to be happy. He doesn’t need Jared, in any capacity, least of all as an enemy, or a rival, or whatever he is to Evan now.

“Please don’t, I don’t want you doing this anymore. I know you were trying to help, or, I don’t know, you were defending me, but there’s. It’s a long story, and I don’t, it’s between us, okay? If I need you, if I want you to do anything I’ll tell you.”

“Okay,” Kendall says.

Evan stares at the mug cupped between his hands, and hopes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd
> 
> thank u so much for all the nice comments! i'm having a lot of fun so far. i promise as things go on there'll be a lot more interaction between the actual deh characters, but at the moment evan's in a position where he's sort of alienated himself from basically everyone who knows about the connor project. my tumblrs @goldspill if u wanna talk - otherwise i'll be back with another chapter at some point soon


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **tw for underage drinking**

“Do you think I should, like, do I respond?” Evan asks, frowning intently at the dregs of his beer like he’s reading tea leaves. They aren’t telling him much.

“To Jared?” Dustin asks, like it’s obvious that that’s what Evan’s referring to. He _is_ referring to that, of course, because Jared occupies a good thirty percent of his thoughts nowadays, but there’s no reason Dustin should know that.

“I guess,” Evan says, as though neither confirming nor denying the fact that, yes, of course he’s talking about Jared, is somehow less suspicious than just admitting to it. “I just, like, should I tell him? I really didn’t, it wasn’t actually my fault. To be honest.”

Dustin shrugs, and takes the beer Atif’s been offering him for the past couple of minutes like it’s the first time he’s noticed it. Evan’s not entirely sure why they’re drinking at 3pm on a Wednesday evening, but Dustin said something about how 'you're only in college once’, and Evan’s not going to pass on free beer.

Dustin has a strange kind of magnetism about him, which he’s been utilising to gradually weasel some of the older students on their terrestrial ecosystem module (Evan’s not sure he fully understands what exactly they’re learning in those lectures,) out of their alcohol supply. He has a sneaking suspicion Dustin just lets them all get horrendously drunk and then walks off with the rest of the beer, but he’s not going to start throwing accusations around when none of them are actually allowed to buy their own alcohol yet.

“The note was pretty passive-aggressive, Evan,” Atif says, ever the voice of reason (and especially so now, because Evan’s never been entirely reasonable when it comes to Jared, and Dustin has the alcohol tolerance of a grade-schooler). “I think it would probably just make things worse for you.”

“It was just aggressive-aggressive, really,” Dustin says, gesturing with his right hand and promptly tipping a healthy portion of his beer onto Evan’s leg.

“Okay,” Evan says, staring resignedly at the rapidly spreading wet patch on his chinos.

Atif takes the seat across from him and gives him a sympathetic look.

“I really think I should tell him,” Evan says.

“I think you’ve had too much to drink, Evan,” Atif says.

“I really think,” Evan begins, “that if I just explained. That it would be fine.”

Atif’s shaking his head. In the back of his mind Evan is mostly in agreement with him. He knows, rationally, that interacting with Jared in any capacity is only going to spur him on - he hadn’t actually engaged with Evan at all before Kendall stepped in, and even then it had only been a one-off note. He really has nothing to gain in messaging Jared or whatever. It’s been almost a week since the note, and Evan hasn’t heard anything from him. Kendall’s presumably shut down the bot. Evan doesn’t _need_ to talk things out with him.

He wants to, though.

Most of the time he doesn’t, really - most of the time he really _is_ content with the idea of just, not speaking to Jared for the rest of eternity. When he’s had something to drink, though, or when it’s late at night and he can’t sleep and all he can do is replay their last few conversations over and over and over in his head - well. He wants closure.

He wants to argue, he wants to yell at him, he wants to ask what, exactly, Evan had done to him that was worth sacrificing their years of friendship.

“You should do it,” Dustin says, knocking his beer can against Evan’s. “I’ll help you draft a message, it’ll be great.”

“No,” Atif starts, “that’s definitely - that won’t help, Dustin.”

Evan has no idea how Atif’s so unaffected by the alcohol, but it’s probably mostly just the fact that Atif kind of has his life together.

“I think I should,” Evan says again. It seems very important, right now, that he gains Atif’s approval before he does this incredibly impulsive and probably bad thing.

“Look, Evan - you know I can’t actually stop you. But maybe you should wait until you’re sober, at least. I think if you gave yourself the time to just sit and think about it properly, then maybe-”

“Oh, he’s writing something,” Dustin says.

Atif sighs. “Yeah, okay.”

Evan’s trying valiantly to type out a mostly-coherent tweet, but it’s surprisingly difficult when slightly tipsy, and he’s always been bad at using a touch screen.

 **evan** @quaking_aspen **  
** @scp_420_j hi the bot wasnt me.jsut so you know because you did that note thifn so i thought you wld wnat to know. Ok

“Okay,” Atif says again, as he reads the tweet.

Dustin’s muffling his laughter in one of the couch cushions. Evan’s quickly beginning to realise that Atif was most definitely right, and he really shouldn’t have done that. He goes and gets another beer from Dustin’s mini fridge, because it’s the closest thing to a solution he has right now.

 

* * *

  

“Oh my god,” Evan murmurs into Dustin’s shoulder, before lifting his head to glare weakly at Atif. “Why did you let me do that, man?”

Atif, to his credit, stopped drinking a while ago. He’s watching a netflix documentary about sea life on Dustin’s television, as far as Evan can tell, though he’s not sure whether he’s actually paying attention to it or not. Dustin’s in an even worse state than Evan, slumped against him like a rag doll, though Evan’s had at least another two cans since tweeting Jared and has since been refusing to so much as glance at his phone.

“I tried to stop you. You were quite insistent.”

Evan’s not even horribly drunk, and he definitely wasn’t when he’d sent the tweet. He’d been tipsy, sure, but being properly drunk would have been a far better excuse. As is, he’s probably going to have a hard time justifying it to himself in the morning.

He hadn’t exactly been intending on sleeping in Dustin’s dorm, but he doesn’t fancy his chances at making it home right now, and he knows his mom will be disappointed if he shows up the way he is. If he stays here, at least, she’ll probably just be glad he’s ‘making friends’. This, of course, means he’s going to be spending a truly hellish night on Dustin’s ratty couch. He also doesn’t have any clothes for tomorrow, or any of his notes, and it’s really just the worst situation.

“Dustin, I need to, I’m sleeping on your couch. You need to go to bed.”

Atif’s dorm is maybe a five minute walk from Dustin’s, and not for the first time Evan envies him for it. Mostly because Dustin’s dorm is gross as hell, and Evan would love to just walk to his room instead.

“I’ll take that as my cue to leave,” Atif says easily. “You guys have a good night.”

“You’re a cool guy, Atif,” Dustin says, giving him a wobbly thumbs up as he tries to extract himself from the couch, nearly tripping over his coffee table in the process.

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” Evan says. “And I also think you’re a cool guy.”

“Bye, Evan,” Atif says, mouth tilted up in a half-smile, like he’s just indulging him at this point. It’s probably fair, because Evan’s been complaining about the Jared thing, like, way too much for one evening. He’s self-aware enough to recognise that much.

Evan pushes himself off the couch, and then starts guiding Dustin towards his bed, away from the fridge, where he’d been heading. In a way, Evan thinks, they’d been helping Dustin by letting him drink so much. When he’s legally allowed to maybe he’ll actually be able to handle more than two beers.

* * *

 

The next morning isn’t great. Dustin’s absolutely miserable, and Evan’s not in the best of moods. His head is aching like he smashed it against the wall a couple of times, and he feels nauseous when he so much as thinks about food. He’s not sure he’s going to make it to his first two lectures, or even his later ones, really. It’s hard to focus past the stabbing pain behind his eyes.

“This feels so bad,” Dustin says mournfully. “Like, so, so bad. The worst.”

“The worst,” Evan agrees.

Dustin’s aggressively tapping on his phone, which is an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that Evan still hasn’t so much as glanced at twitter since sending the tweet to Jared.

“I’m ordering breakfast,” Dustin says. “I can’t cook and I want something hideously greasy. Just unnecessarily greasy.”

Evan makes an approving sound, closing his eyes and trying to sink into a peaceful nonexistence. It doesn’t work, but blocking out the light makes the pain a little easier to deal with. He wonders how Atif’s doing. He’s probably just fine. He kind of wants to be mad about that, but it would just be a poor excuse to ignore the fact that the current situation is almost entirely his own fault. He blames Dustin for getting the beer in the first place, but the drinking it? That was on him.

Evan’s just about managed to work up the courage to look at his phone when he realises he has no charger on him, and his battery is almost certainly dead by now. It’s less of a relief than he’d expected. He shares a schedule with Dustin, so it’s not like he’s going to miss any of his classes because he never bothered to print out a physical timetable, and he knows the bus times pretty much off by heart by now, so getting home won’t be a problem - but his anxiety keeps telling him that there’s going to be _something_. There’ll be something he needs his phone for, and now he doesn’t have it, and - well. It’s not ideal.

“I think my phone’s, it has to be dead by now, right?”

“Oh, definitely,” Dustin says. “That blows.”

* * *

 

Evan gets through the day, and that’s about the most positive a spin he can possible put on it. He misses his first two lectures, as predicted, and the rest of the day, at least academically, is pretty much a write-off. He can’t focus for long enough that he can make any legible notes, with his brain working at half-speed understanding the content of the talks is nigh impossible. Atif’s been unreasonably sympathetic, given that none of this is his fault. If there was one thing he got right last night it was that Atif really is a good guy.

He makes it home without any real problems despite everything, and he hasn’t actually had to use his phone (though he has spent most of the day feeling unreasonably worried about the prospect), so it’s not the worst day ever. Just a pretty bad one.

He plugs his phone in to charge face-down, because at least this way he won’t feel obliged to open twitter just because he has notifications. He can mentally prepare himself first.

His mom’s not home, a fact he’s grateful for, as it means he can spend the next few hours lying in bed and regretting everything that happened the night before. His resolve lasts for about twenty minutes, after which he realises that he’s actually not going to fall asleep anytime soon, and if he’s not doing something he just ends up thinking instead. Right now he doesn’t really want to be thinking.

He not really sure what to expect when he turns on his phone. He’s still surprised.

 

* * *

 

“He started following me, Kendall,” he says out loud as he continues pacing the room.

Evan hates phone conversations, but he needed to talk to someone, and leaving his phone on speakerphone makes it feel a little more like they’re talking face-to-face. He runs a hand through his hair and tugs lightly on the few strands that get caught between his fingers.

“I just, I don’t understand,” he says. “He didn’t even reply, he just - I don’t get it.”

“You sound like a teenage girl,” Kendall tells him, “or, like, the stereotype of one at least. The whole ‘Oh my god… but _three_ hearts? What does that even _mean?_ ’ type thing.”

“Thanks, Kendall, that’s, that’s helpful, that’s great, thank you.”

“Okay, Evan. I can see that you’re freaking out.”

“Yes, just a little,” he says. He’s not sure why he called Kendall instead of Atif or Dustin, who aren’t the kind of people to program a twitter bot solely for the purpose of insulting his ex-best-friend, and therefore probably better suited for a conversation about him, but he’d been hoping she’d have something helpful to say. Anything, at this point.

“It has to be a good thing, right?” she asks.

No, Evan thinks, and he can tell she’s of a similar mind because she doesn’t sound all that confident in the idea either.

“Like, maybe this is his way of saying ‘I accept your sort-of apology, but also I don’t actually want to talk to you outright, because the whole mutual-ignoring-each-other’s-existence thing was a good shout’.”

“I mean, it wasn’t really an apology,” Evan says, because they both know this really wasn’t his fault at all, and he’s never wanted to apologise to Jared for any of the stuff that happened in high school. The idea that he might have something to apologise for is kind of insulting, really.

“Okay,” Kendall says, “but it’s a possibility. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.”

It sounds like it might be physically paining her to say that, and Evan can understand why. Jared hasn’t exactly made the best first impression ever, and Kendall’s heard all of the worst stories Evan has about him.

“Maybe not,” Evan says, because his twitter feed’s just updated.

Evan had followed Jared back, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, if he really was trying to be nice. Apparently that had been a mistake.

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
shockingly enough ‘i didnt do it’ doesnt actually constitute an apology. weird that some people apparently havent grasped that

“Oh, I’ll kill him myself,” Kendall says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd
> 
> i'm so unbelievably flattered by the feedback i've been getting on this fic, esp considering that so much of the stuff happening at the moment involves ocs rather than actual deh characters, which can understandably put a lot of people off. thank you so much


	4. Chapter 4

Evan doesn’t use Twitter all that much. This, he’s come to learn recently, is probably a very good thing.

As furious as Kendall had been at Jared’s tweet, she’d also insisted that he couldn’t unfollow him. According to her that would be admitting defeat, and at the time Evan had agreed. Mostly out of spite. The issue with Jared is that he doesn’t just stop doing things. Once he’s committed he follows through, and even though Evan’s given absolutely no indication that he’s seeing Jared’s posts, let alone caring about them, he persists.

So it’s a good thing Twitter’s not one of the social media sites Evan actually uses, or at least doesn’t use frequently. It should mean that the whole ‘following Jared’ things isn’t a problem. He doesn’t end up absentmindedly checking his Twitter only to find that Jared’s been tweeting about him yet again, because he _doesn’t_ absentmindedly check Twitter. Instead he ends up purposefully checking Twitter. And he does so knowing full well that Jared’s going to have said something, yet again - is going to have made a snide remark about his polo shirt, or his hair, or the utter betrayal he’d apparently committed back in high school - which is almost worse.

He and Kendall have taken to sending each other the tweets so that they can mock them incessantly together (Kendall is far better at it than he is), but it’s not quite enough to erase the dull pain he gets in his chest with every new insult.

He can’t not check Twitter now though, not when he knows Jared’s still going to be talking about him even if he’s not there to see it. And that’s worse, really - the idea that he’s going to be saying shitty things about him and he won’t even know.

 

* * *

 

 **Kendall Lowry  
** I know we’ve been making jokes abt it but are you really doing ok? With the whole jared thing? I can talk to him if you need me to  
And i mean like, seriously, not just to be mean to him or whatever. I can get him to stop, probably

 **Evan Hansen  
** no it’s ok. it’s not like he’s actually doing anything like, it’s not really awful? like it sucks and it’s mean, but it’s not seriously upsetting or anything  
i can take a few snide remarks about my dress sense

He’s playing it off, but some of the things Jared says aren’t quite so uninspired. He knows what Evan’s sore spots are better than anyone else, even with the years that have passed. He knows what to say to cut deep. He doesn’t seem to be trying to, most of the time - the insults aren’t exactly friendly barbs, but they’re surface-level insults. They’re not genuinely hurtful, not in the sense that they’re something Evan’s going to stay up all night thinking about. Most of them.

 **Kendall Lowry  
** Okay. i’m trusting that you’re telling me the truth right now but like. The offer’s always there, okay?  
Maybe this is a bad question to ask, so if i’m overstepping you can say, but i don’t really get why you care so much. Abt what he thinks of you  
You’re on twitter so often now, and you never were before, + i just don’t understand why? So he’s a douchebag you were friends with in high school, but it’s been years + just bc he’s hung up on it doesn’t mean u have to be, you know >?

 **Evan Hansen  
** i dunno. it’s just we were, like, we were best friends. and it’s different now, but i didn’t really have friends in high school? So  
i don’t know  
it seems like it matters

 **Kendall Lowry  
** This is probably a stupid thing to say, but not everybody’s going to like you, evan. Not in a mean way, but just like. U can’t please everyone. It’s just not possible

He doesn’t need everybody to like him, Evan thinks. Just Jared.

 

* * *

 

It’s not that he’s obsessed, really - they’re just particularly distracting. The tweets.

He’s sitting in Atif’s dorm room, beside Dustin, trying not to spill chicken chow mein all over his carpet. Atif, for some reason, doesn’t have a table in his room, and the block he lives in doesn’t have a dedicated communal seating thing, so - the floor. It’s kind of nice, in a way, the easy familiarity.

Dustin’s in the middle of recounting the previous night’s exploits - something about a girl chatting him up at the university bar, where he’d ended up after a half-hearted attempt at pre’s with some of his housemates. It should be weird listening to Dustin talk about an awkward hookup, but according to Dustin that the guy she’d brought with her was, ‘like, way hotter’. So he’d spent the whole evening trying to avoid the girl’s come-ons in favour of flirting with her friend. He failed, miserably, but had a nice conversation with ‘Coraline’ about politics.

Evan’s only half-listening, mostly focused on trying to use his chopsticks correctly. He doesn’t, and ends up heading to the kitchen to find a fork. When he gets back he finds his phone has lit up with notifications in his absence - presumably Jared’s on some kind of Twitter rant yet again. That’s pretty much all he posts, outside of his thinly veiled Evan-insults. Evan puts his phone on silent and turns it over, and tells himself that he’s having a good time with his friends and is definitely not interested in whatever it is that Jared has to say.

Dustin and Atif are both staring at him, he realises when he looks up. Dustin seems more curious than anything else, eyebrows raised just slightly. Atif looks somewhat unimpressed, and Evan just hopes it’s because of Jared rather than himself.

Dustin waves a hand at his phone. “What’s, since when are you and Jared buddies or whatever? Why are you following him? And why hasn’t he blocked you yet?”

“Uh,” Evan starts, fumbling for an explanation he doesn’t have prepared. “You know how I sent that one tweet -”

“Oh we are _well_ aware,” Atif says, “or some of us are at least. I’m not sure Dustin remembers most of what happened.”

“Well he, when I got home after I checked my phone, and he’d started following me? He hadn’t, like, he didn’t actually say anything about the tweet, so I guess I thought he was okay with things now, or whatever. Maybe it was dumb, but Kendall - anyway. Um. So I followed him back, and then. Well, obviously, he didn’t forgive me. So now I’m just stuck following him, and he spends like, a ridiculous amount of time saying mean things directed at me. At least I think they are. I mean, he never - he doesn’t mention me by name, but I don’t think he actually had any other friends before college. So. You know.”

Atif sighs deeply, something Evan assumes is entirely for his own benefit. Dustin jabs at his noodles with a chopstick, like they’ve personally offended him.

“You can just block him, you know,” Atif says.

Evan avoids his gaze and shrugs.

It’s not something he can explain, really - why he still hasn’t unfollowed him. Now that the frustration from the original tweet has subsided he doesn’t really care about the idea of Jared thinking he’s beaten him, somehow, that Evan might be giving up by unfollowing him. It stopped being a valid excuse a while ago. And Evan knows, realistically, that Jared’s tweeting for his benefit. There were tweets before that, of course - Alana had told him as much - but nowhere near this frequently, and back then they seemed to be about things Jared was genuinely upset about, like he was venting. Now they’re just filled with pointless insults. If Evan just stopped looking at Twitter Jared would probably keep it up, because there’s no way he knows Evan’s even seeing the tweets now - but blocking or unfollowing him means he’ll know he's now. And he has a feeling Jared wouldn’t care enough to keep going without a potential audience.

“I know,” he says.

“I vote we egg his house,” Dustin says, “like, actually seriously. Or his window I guess. No one else in his house has done anything. Have they?”

“No,” Evan says, “And I’m not, is that really a good idea?”

“Neither one of us is in a position to be talking about what’s a bad idea,” Dustin says, “you absolute hypocrite.”

Atif’s silently picking at his egg fried rice, like he’s determined to ignore the conversation. It’s fair enough, given that his very sensible suggestions are almost always refuted.

“I’m going to do it with or without your help, Evan,” Dustin says, “you cannot dissuade me from my knightly task. But it’d be cool if I wasn’t just doing it by myself, ‘cause I’d really like a lookout.”

 

* * *

 

Evan’s holding a carton of eggs. They’re standing outside what Dustin’s assured him is ‘probably Jared’s accommodation’, which is already kind of awful as a concept. The possibility that Jared might appear at any time is bad enough without the additional fact that they’re there with every intention of sort-of-vandalising his windows.

“Oh, this is such a bad idea,” Evan says.

Dustin takes an egg from the carton and throws it as hard as he can at the wall.

“Yep,” he says.

Evan stares at the sad, wet, patch now staining the brickwork for a second, before moving to look up at Jared’s (or what is probably Jared’s) second floor window. He looks back to the wall, and watches the yolk make its way towards the ground, like a fat yellow slug. He grimaces.

“What if - can the shells, like, scratch up the windows do you think? I don’t want, it’s not the university’s fault - I don’t want to cause property damage, somehow, if that’s -”

“I don’t think so,” Dustin interrupts. “Probably.”

Atif’s leant up against a tree a few feet away. He’s their lookout in name only, because a couple of seconds after Evan and Dustin headed towards the building he started fiddling about on his phone instead. Evan wishes he wasn’t involved either.

“Can we - I don’t think we can do this, actually,” Evan says, “just in case, I don’t - can we do something different?”

Dustin looks put out, but shrugs. He eyes the eggs for a minute, and then reaches into his backpack and pulls out a canister of silly string.

“We’re gonna drop these eggs out of my window later though,” he says, before handing the can to Evan.

“Can this even reach that far up?” Evan asks, pressing it back into Dustin’s hands with a force he rarely exhibits. He might be helping Dustin, but he’s sure as hell not going to be the one actually _responsible_ for their sort-of-crime.

“Only one way to find out!” Dustin says, and aims the nozzle squarely towards the window.

It can't.

“This has been, just, a fundamentally disappointing experience,” he says.

Evan’s not sure he agrees. Mostly he’s just relieved they’re not going to be getting in any trouble - he’s pretty confident the rain’s just going to wash the remnants of the one egg off the wall, and the silly string just ended up in a sad little heap in the grass. Probably bad for the environment, but not exactly a problem legally.

“I’m going to leave him a message,” Dustin says, which is a phrase that Evan really didn’t want to hear.

Dustin is kind of the incarnation of chaos, sometimes, and it’s not a surprise that he still feels that they need to achieve some kind of recompense, but a message can be traced back to them. Pretty much any of the things they’d been planning could (and would) be, because there’s no one else with an intense personal grudge towards Jared, as far as Evan is aware, but this seems more obvious.

Dustin’s writes out ‘suck my dick jared’ on the wall. It takes him a good ten minutes, because the string wouldn’t stick, or would go all wonky and lopsided, but it ends up being mostly understandable, if a little messy.

Evan had been feeling mostly okay up until now, because this is the kind of thing university students do, and Jared’s hardly the type to report people for something like this (even if it is Evan), but now that he’s seeing it up on the wall in full colour he’s beginning to feel a little nauseous.

“It’s less of a statement piece than I thought it’d be,” Dustin says.

 

* * *

 

They end up back at Dustin’s after that, so that he can do whatever it is he wanted to do with the eggs. He’s leaning so far out of his window that Evan’s almost worried for his safety, but seems happy enough. Every now and again he hears the muffled crack of impact, and a whoop of joy shortly after. Atif’s sitting across from him, reading a book like a real student. Evan’s talking to Kendall again.

He’d sent her a photo of the wall, because even if it’d been a less than brilliant experience for him he was sure she’d enjoy hearing about it. He’d been right, and she’s been sending him approving messages for the past couple of minutes. He’s pretty sure she likes Dustin more than him, nowadays, with the stories he tells her about him. They seem to have similar ideas regarding the proper way to deal with situations (bad ones, Evan thinks privately).

 **Kendall Lowry  
** This is good! Not just for the obvious reason that ur ex friends a little bitch but like. Releasing your anger in a healthy way. That’s basically step one of dealing with things. Presumably

 **Evan Hansen  
** thanks. i kind of don’t want to see his reaction? like i guess it would be, i know pranks are meant to be funny but i think he’s just going to be even worse now?

 **Kendall Lowry  
** Oh almost definitely. But you have friends there, and you have me, so he can do his worst  
Not that i want him to, but if he does we’ve got your back  
Plus he’s probably too much of a pussy to properly escalate things. Like everything so far has been pretty vague even if it was public, idk that that’s gonna change

It seems a reasonable assumption, even though basically all of Evan’s assumptions lately have been wrong. Jared’s a performer, sure, but he’s also not the kind of person who can put up with a lot of criticism. Doing stuff publicly - actually insulting Evan to his face, or on social media or whatever, that’s not Jared’s style. Too much of a risk of other people actually getting annoyed by it. He can get away with his tweets because he’s being vague, and it seems ridiculous to assume that all of the posts are about just one person (though Evan’s fully aware they are).

It’s not like they’d done anything particularly heinous though, and it’s quite possible it’d been washed away by the rain, or a campus groundskeeper, before Jared ever had a chance to see it. That’s what Evan keeps telling himself, anyway.

 **Evan Hansen  
** yeah. maybe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so sorry that this took so long to update. i've been taking on a lot of commissions recently, and it's kind of sapping all my time. nonetheless! i'm back, and will hopefully update a little sooner next time. one or two chapters and then we'll have a pov change, i think
> 
> unbeta'd as always. if you want to talk fic, or see what else i've been working on, my tumblr's @goldspill. if not, i should be back within the next week or so. thanks again for all your feedback!


	5. Chapter 5

“Alana says hi, by the way,” Evan tells his mom in passing, as he goes to sit on the couch. It’s a Saturday, and one of the few full days the two of them have had free at the same time. It’s really the only opportunity they’ve had to sit and talk properly since Evan started university, and he’s not ashamed to say he’s missed his mom. That’s not to say that things haven’t been strained between them, that there haven’t been moments when he’s been glad he’s had some time apart from her - but it’s nice to be back, for a little while.

She places a mug of tea in front of him, and he’s too polite to let her know that university life’s done nothing to change his lack of love for the drink. He endeavours to sip very, very slowly at it, until he can quietly pour the rest down the drain.

“I’m so glad you two are still talking,” his mom says, smiling softly. “You and Jared -”

Evan’s smile drops, and his mom stops talking, instinctively. There’s an awkward pause as his mom struggles for words, expression screwed up apologetically. Evan stares at the coffee table. They try not to talk about Jared, nowadays. His mom had always hoped that they’d reconnect in college, somehow, had always held out hope that one day Jared would forgive him, that their childhood friendship would eventually win out over everything else. Evan hadn’t had the heart to tell her they’d never really been friends in the first place. After Evan had started college, and a week or two had gone by without him so much as mentioning Jared, they’d reached an unspoken agreement to just… not mention him.

Up until now, it seems.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she says, “I just thought - I’d really hoped, what with the two of you going to the same college now, that you might get talking again. You used to be so close.”

“Yeah,” Evan says awkwardly, wringing his hands gently and staring at the line where the wall meets the carpet. “I know, just - we didn’t. It’s not like that anymore. Um.”

He mumbles something wordless and shrugs. His mom pats his shoulder reassuringly, and he takes a sip of his tea so that he doesn’t have to say anything else.

“It’s sad,” she says, “I know friends drift apart all the time, but I never really thought it’d happen to you two.”

Evan’s not quite sure he’d call it drifting apart, as such.

 

* * *

  

It’s 10pm when Evan gets the first text from Dustin.

He’s sat at his desk aimlessly trawling google for research papers he’s hoping he can pass off as somewhat relevant to his next environmental microbiology essay when it comes through, and he doesn’t waste a second before he’s giving up on that in favour of his phone. It’s a photo, one that’s quickly followed by the caption ‘located’, which makes sense because it’s a picture of Jared. This is exactly the sort of thing Evan expects from Dustin.

There’s a slightly blurred rainbow flag in the background, which Evan takes to mean that Dustin’s at another LGBT mixer of some description. He makes a point of not thinking about the implications of Jared being there too.

Maybe it’s generous to call it a photo of Jared, because in reality it’s mostly a photo of half of Dustin’s face, and then sort-of-Jared, and a flag. Evan can only really tell it’s Jared because he can recognise Jared pretty much anywhere, which is a thought he’d rather not dwell on. There are a lot of Jared-related thoughts he’d rather not dwell on, in fact. Nearly all of them.

He spends longer looking at the photo than he’d like to admit.

It’s kind of sad, but it’s the most relaxed he’s seen Jared in years, even if it is only a blurry, pixelated kind of blob-Jared. Whenever he sees Jared in person he’s ramrod-straight and tensed, like seeing Evan sends him into fight-or-flight mode instinctively. Here he’s easy, and relaxed, and Evan can just about make out the loose curve of a smile on his face, a tiny smudge on the screen. He feels something in his chest pull like he’s breathing wrong.

Dustin sends another photo.

This one’s half a selfie. The other half’s Jared, again, glaring directly at the phone. Or at Dustin, more likely, but given that he’s the one holding the phone it’s basically the same thing. It’s a better photo, which is probably worse for Dustin and Evan, because it means that Jared knows exactly what’s going on now. It’s also worse for Evan’s heart, specifically.

Dustin follows that one up with a text too. This one’s a slightly misspelled variation on ‘mission compromised’, which Evan justly ignores. He scrolls back up to the photo, frowning slightly as he does so. Jared’s no longer all soft edges, he’s tense and angry and defensive, and it’s because of them, as always, and Evan wonders, not for the first time, if maybe Jared’s not just playing the victim. If maybe there’s more blame to be shared than he’d like to think.

He scrolls up again, to the first photo, spends a couple of seconds staring at the thumbprint figure outlined against the rainbow flag, bright and smiling, and then he turns off his phone. His mom’s already gone to sleep, her shift due to start at god-only-knows what time in the morning. She’d reheated him pizza for his dinner and it sits next to his laptop now, forgotten. In the end they’d only managed a couple of hours together before she’d had to disappear again.

He’d thought maybe when he finally got to university she’d get a chance to rest, to stop working such long hours, to focus on law, but she still wears bags under her eyes like she was born into them, even now.

His bed is cold, and his house doesn’t feel much like a home at all.

 

* * *

 

Sunday Evan edits his lecture notes, and then it’s a Monday morning, and Dustin is hugging him very, very tightly. Evan’s too tired to protest, which is probably why he’s just letting it happen.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Dustin tells him, voice muffled against Evan’s polo.

Evan mumbles an agreement and pats his back awkwardly, trying to catch Atif’s eye as best he can through the wafts of Dustin’s hair currently obstructing his vision.

Atif clearly takes pity on him.

“You can take a copy of mine too,” he says, pulling a neatly bound collection of papers out of his bag. “I can always just print out another.”

Dustin takes that as his cue to finally release Evan from the hug, sighing and nodding to no one in particular.

It’s not that Dustin’s unreliable, or a bad student. It’s not even that he procrastinates - if anything he’s usually the first out of the three of them to have whatever essay they’ve been assigned finished - it’s just that he has a lot of stuff going on. That’s what he tells Evan and Atif, at least, and neither of them have asked for any further explanation. He hasn’t offered any.

So sometimes he’ll come to them the day before an essay’s due with nothing prepared. Obviously they help, because they’re his friends, and they have literally no idea what it is he’s struggling with. They’d probably help even if he had nothing prepared just because he was being lazy, but Evan has a feeling it runs deeper than that.

Dustin gives Atif a soft smile as he unzips his rucksack, and Evan moves to close his own when something catches his eye.

It’s Jared, because Jared’s the only thing that really captures his attention for more than a couple of seconds at a time. He’s watching Dustin like he’s making a point of _not_ watching Evan.

He doesn’t look sad, per se, or even particularly angry, for a change. He just looks sort of distant. He hasn’t taken his eyes off whatever it is that Dustin and Atif are doing, so Evan turns back to look at them for a second. Dustin gives Evan a quick smile, and Atif stands and tilts his head towards their lecture hall questioningly.

When Evan glances back towards Jared he’s not looking in their direction at all.

 

* * *

 

Atif taps the sentence he just highlighted a couple of times with the tip of his pen.

“This bit,” he says, “maybe you could rephrase it? I don’t think it’s wrong, it just seems a bit redundant, when you’ve already talked about-”

“Yeah, no, okay,” Evan says, moving to type something out on his laptop, “let me just, I can change that, thank you.”

“No problem, man,” Atif says.

They’ve had their first two lectures of the day, and Dustin’s busy getting lunch with someone he met from the French course he’s taking, so it’s just the two of them in the library. Atif’s mostly just been reading, but every now and again Evan will hand him a print out of the essay he’s trying to write, which Atif will dutifully tear to shreds in front of him. It’s a good system, and entirely necessary, because unlike most of the essays they’ve had to write thus far this one actually counts towards Evan’s final grade.

It takes him a minute or two of typing to notice that Atif’s stopped reading his book.

“What’s, are you okay?” Evan asks, mildly concerned.

Atif doesn’t look particularly bothered, just leans back slightly in his chair and folds the book shut over his thumb so he can keep his page.

“I’m okay,” he says, easily. “Are you okay, Evan? I know you don’t want to talk about it-”

“Oh my god,” Evan says, “look, Atif, no offence but I’m not, I don’t know why everyone seems to think that this whole thing with Jared is a whole, is some big deal to me. It’s not. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine, okay? I don’t need, I don’t want to talk about it. Really.”

Atif frowns pensively.

“Okay,” Evan says, “I realise how that sounded.”

“It’s okay,” Atif says, “I’m not going to push you to talk about something you don’t want to. I just wanted to put the offer out there, since Dustin’s off doing whatever it is he does with strangers at lunches.”

“Thanks, Atif,” Evan says, staring at his keyboard contemplatively.

Atif goes back to reading, or at least goes back to looking like he’s reading.

The thing is - no one really knows what happened between him and Jared. Or, at least, the people who do - the Murphys, Alana, his mom - he can’t just talk to them about it. He had a therapist (not anymore, though he still has semi-regular meetings with his psychiatrist), but that’s not the kind of ‘talking about Jared’ Atif means. It’s a more tempting offer than Evan would’ve anticipated, given that it also requires admitting that Evan’s kind of been an awful person in the past. And not even in the particularly distant past.

“Um,” Evan says, quietly, “I.”

Atif doesn’t look up from his book, just raises his eyebrows slightly.

“Can you just give me some time? I _do_ , I think I want to talk about it, but just. I guess I kind of need to figure out how to? First?”

“Okay,” Atif says.

“Okay,” Evan says.

“Cool,” Atif says, and keeps reading.

 

* * *

 

When Evan checks his Twitter feed in the evening it is alive with activity. Most of it is courtesy of Kendall and Josh, and a couple of other ecology major’s Evan’s gotten to know outside of Dustin and Atif. The rest of the tweets are from Jared, who appears to be drunk.

Evan’s only making an educated guess, obviously, but as he can barely comprehend what he’s reading, he thinks it’s a fair assumption. The tweets are absolutely littered with typos, and there’s barely a narrative for him to follow. Mostly it seems like Jared just went to a party, got drunk, watched a film and then got sad.

He doesn’t read the tweets properly.

Jared’s a depressing drunk. He and Jared never got properly wasted in high school - they were teenagers, and Evan’s mom was only _so_ okay with underage drinking in the house - but he’d seen him drink enough to get melancholy, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He knows exactly the kind of thing he’s going to be saying, and he knows that his most recent tweets (i.e. the ones that aren’t just about whatever film it was he was watching) are going to be personal, which means that at least some of them will be about Evan.

He knows he’s not going to want to see that.

He tries to scroll past Jared’s tweets, to lighter content, to see whatever it was Kendall was tweeting about earlier, but it’s like Jared’s done nothing but post all night. It’s almost sad, how desperately he seems to have been documenting his evening, like it won’t have happened unless he’s been posting about it. Jared’s always been like that, though.

Evan scrolls back up to the top of his feed in defeat, and watches idly. Every now and again he’ll flick over to another tab to try and do something productive, or to change whatever song he has playing in the background, but mostly he just waits to see what else Jared has to say.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he hates himself for it.

If nothing else Jared’s at least sobered up enough that he’s typing properly now though. That or he’s turned auto-correct back on.

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
u ever think about how u deserved better

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
like not in a cosmic sense or whatever but just like fucking

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
people love to play the victim when they really were just as much a part of everything as you were i dont even know why im bothering to be vague

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
you cant just act the victim you cant just pretend like youre the good guy and have that like BE the narrative thats not how it fucking works

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
i just mean like fcuk man IT WASNT JUST MEthats all i mean just

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
SOMETIMES YOURE THE BAD GUY

A good five minutes pass by. Evan doesn’t manage to do much more than stare blankly at the computer screen.

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
fuck you evan

 **the insanely cool jared kleinman** @scp_420_j  
you were meant to be my friend

 

* * *

 

When Evan wakes up in the morning it’s to a Twitter feed that’s clean and empty. When he thinks to check, he finds that he’s no longer following Jared.

He’s not surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd. im on new meds so if anythings off its cause side-effects include a decrease in cognitive functioning. Fuck Yeah
> 
> anyway. jared pov next chapter cause in this house we love to suffer. ill try and do a pov switch every 5 chapters maybe, tho ill probably fuck that up somehow. follow me on tumblr @goldspill. apparently im a scott pilgrim blog now
> 
> much love


	6. Chapter 6

“Does this really need to be happening here, man?”

“I’m sorry, Eric,” Jared says from his position slouched over the second-floor toilet (and really, who the fuck thought that was a sensible idea, giving the whole floor a single toilet to share,) “do you have anywhere better for it to be happening?”

“I need to piss.”

“I’m hungover as shit, asshole, there’s a toilet downstairs! Or have you lost the ability to walk as well as think?”

Eric gives him a filthy look but nevertheless slopes off down the hall. Jared doesn’t bother watching him leave, just stares grimly into the toilet bowl and tries not to retch. He hates alcohol. He hates drinking, he hates hangovers, he hates parties, and he _really_ fucking hates Evan Hansen.

He gives it another five minutes or so just to be on the safe side, and once he’s reasonably certain that the worst of the sickness has passed he pulls himself to his feet, quite literally, clinging to the sink like its a rock in cold water, and stumbles back to his room. He turns off the light the second he gets there, hoping vainly that it might somewhat relieve the strain on his eyes. Instead it just makes it harder for him to figure out where he’s meant to be walking, because his floor’s covered in shit, and now it’s dark too.

He collapses onto his bed and buries his face in his pillow. He can smell vomit, or beer, or something equally gross, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t feel the urge to throw up all over again.

It blows.

 

* * *

 

“Jared, you need to get the fuck out of bed.”

“I don’t,” Jared says, quite reasonably, from his bed.

He’s slept off the worst of his hangover by now but he still feels pretty awful, and he just doesn’t want to get up, which has been his justification for not leaving his room so far. No one’s bothered to call him out on it, probably because of the very public breakdown he had the night before that no one wants to acknowledge.

He’s well aware of the fact that it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. He’s just choosing to ignore it.

“You’re being pathetic.”

“Fuck off,” he says.

“Look, Jared, this is very sad and everything, but you can’t just sit in your room and feel sorry for yourself or whatever.”

“I’m sorry, who are you again?” Jared says, “because I distinctly remember Lena being one of my friends, not-”

“Jesus Christ dude,” she says. “Just open the fucking door.”

Jared gets up and does so, because if he’s being honest with himself he’s getting kind of bored of just lying in bed, and even Lena has to be better than nothing. If he takes his time doing so that’s just because he’s _really_ tired, though.

“Lena,” he says, politely.

“Jared,” she replies, as he gestures for her to enter the room. “How are you doing, buddy?”

“I'm just peachy. Now let’s not talk about it.”

She sighs, taking a seat on his bed and patting the spot next to her. He’s surprised she hasn’t mentioned the state of his room, or made a snarky comment about the smell of vodka yet, and figures she really is holding back, even if it might seem otherwise. Jared’s not sure whether he appreciates it or kind of hates it.

“Look,” she says, “you know I don’t want to be having this conversation with you. Like at all. But-”

“I know,” he says. “I mean it, Lena, just drop it. It doesn’t matter.”

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Jared,” Lena says, quiet and smooth, deliberately looking away from him. He has a feeling she’s not just talking about the whole Twitter thing. “And not just to yourself, it -”

“Lena,” he starts, not quite sure what he’s going to say but desperate to stop her from talking, because he doesn’t need to hear this, not right now, and frankly not ever. “Please, you know -”

“Yeah,” she says, cutting him off abruptly. “I know. I know, man.”

“This sucks,” Jared says.

“Uh huh. Let’s go get pancakes.”

 

* * *

 

Jared’s not even sure what the diner they’re eating at is meant to be called. It sucks, though, he knows that much, and he left his wallet in his room in all the confusion that came with trying to organise a group of college students (impossible), so the only food he’s eaten he’s stolen from other people. No one’s offered to buy him anything, because his friends are assholes, and also because they know Jared’s just going to take their food anyway.

“If you won’t make it your header I’m making it mine,” Lena says from across the table.

“Hey, that’s a public attack on _my_ character you’re talking about there,” Jared says, “you can’t co-opt it for your own amusement. If you want one you can go get your own.”

“Sorry we don’t all have childhood friends-cum-mortal enemies to silly-string our apartment walls with kindergarten insults like ‘suck my dick, Jared’,” she says, glaring at him, accusatory.

Caleb steals a fry from her plate, and Jared moves in to try and snatch her phone.

The silly string’s long washed away now so there’s no way she’s going to be able to get another photo, and he’s pretty sure he still knows the pass-code for her phone from the last time she got completely wasted. He can probably delete anything she has saved if he’s quick about it.

“You both are the absolute _worst_ ,” she says, on her feet in an instant. “You’re too short to win this fight Jared, back off.”

Jared doesn’t protest. He does take, like, half of her remaining fries though.

“Asshole,” she mutters, tapping away at her phone. Jared presumes she’s changing her Twitter header, which at this point he can kind of forgive her for.

“You should come out on Friday,” Caleb says. Or something like that, at least. He says it while eating, which is pretty disgusting, but Caleb’s a pretty gross dude and Jared only puts up with it because they’re basically best friends now. “It’s another pride thing.”

“No,” Jared says.

Lena tries to catch his eye, which he resolutely ignores.

Everyone else is very quiet. Jared would make a snide comment about eavesdropping but he knows it would only be because he feels uncomfortable knowing just how public his business is at the moment. It’s not like it’s their fault. And it’s not like they have to exactly crane their necks to hear him at the moment.

There are six of them in the little booth, even if Jared’s only really been talking to Lena and Caleb. Caleb’s sat on his left hand side, and then Lena across from him, still picking idly at her fries and shooting him concerned looks as best she can. Kavita’s sat next to Caleb, a Mathematics major, and probably too smart to be hanging out with them. On Lena’s right hand side is Marcus, who supposedly lives with them, but who Jared’s seen a sum total of four times so far this term, and who he doesn’t expect to see again before the holidays, and next to _him_ is Andrea, who Lena may or may not be dating. He’s never really been sure.

Lena’s the only one of them who’ll so much as look at him, though that’s just because Caleb’s still focused on trying to take what’s left of her food.

“No offence, Jared,” Caleb says, “but if you’re just saying that because of that one dude -”

“Dustin,” Jared says, because he’s not an idiot, and he’s at least done his research on the shitty people Evan’s apparently decided to befriend. Not that it really required much research. He checked Evan’s Facebook friends list and then spent like two minutes looking at the profiles of the people he’d seen him hanging out with the most often. If it had taken more effort than that he probably wouldn’t have bothered.

“Then you need to think about reporting him for harassment or something. And you need to cut out whatever it is you’re doing. Because it’s a bit of a, like, double-sta-”

“Thanks, Caleb,” Lena says. “Just…”

“No offence, Caleb, but every time you make me go out with you I end up completely wasted and it sucks absolute balls, so.”

“That’s on you, man,” Caleb says, “and anyway you love LGBT nights, you can’t just make me go by myself.”

“No, you love the LGBT nights, you just drag me along with you. When have I ever asked to go to one? Name one time I’ve even willingly volunteered to go without prompting.”

“That’s cheating,” Caleb says.

Kavita starts saying something to Marcus, and Lena gives Jared a tired look, and everyone starts talking again and it’s like nothing ever happened.

Last night’s events and the Dustin thing aren’t technically related, but everyone seems to think they are, which means that the second either gets brought up all conversation grinds to a halt. It’s not like the it’s first time Jared’s had a bad night, which is probably why it’s such a touchy subject.

If it happens once or twice it’s an unhappy coincidence. If it keeps happening it’s a problem.

 

* * *

 

It’s a Wednesday and Jared’s last lecture of the day has just ended, which is why a ragtag group of them have commandeered a section of the nearby park for what is ostensibly a revision session but is more like a picnic with books that none of them are going to use. Jared has his laptop with him, but it’s only going to run for so long without charge, and it only had half a battery’s worth when they left the house anyway. He’s throwing cheese puffs at Caleb’s head. Caleb had been trying to catch them with his mouth for the first couple of minutes or so, before he realised that Jared wasn’t actually aiming for his mouth at all and was just trying to hit him with them. Then he just started ignoring him.

“Do you want a carrot stick?” Kavita asks, holding the bag out to him. They’d managed to dig the fun-size bag out from the very bottom of their fridge, underneath some leftover Chinese food Jared’s pretty sure he was meant to throw out like a week ago, and no one’s checked it for a best before date as far as Jared can tell. He’s not going to be the one to mention it.

“I’m good,” Jared says. “Cheese puff?”

She shakes her head, and he shrugs.

Most of Jared’s days are spent working. Usually that’s in his room, in bed, because he’s always worked better in his own space but has never quite got into the habit of actually using his desk. Very occasionally that’s in the library, but he kind of hates it there, and it’s always quiet to the point of being too loud. If he’s not working he’s either sleeping, or being roped into doing something stupid, or wasting his time. Very rarely does he have the energy for anything else.

Today, apparently, there’s this.

“You should put a film on,” Caleb says, from somewhere next to him, apparently having decided that he’d had enough of playing target practice for Jared.

“I brought my laptop out here to work,” Jared says.

“Shut up, you did not,” Caleb says, “you’re such a liar. I was literally watching you tweet about throwing cheese puffs at me. I saw you doing it.”

He’s not wrong.

“Whatever,” Jared says. “If you wanted to watch a movie we should’ve just stayed inside, dumbass. The glare out here’s gonna-”

“Hey wait a minute,” Lena says, and while normally Jared would’ve been content to just ignore her there’s something about the way she says it that makes him think he should probably just let her have this one. “Is that - fuck. That’s Kendall, right?”

Jared frowns for a second, squinting futilely in the direction Lena seems to be looking in.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” he says. “There are so many people here, Lena, does it even matter?”

“Oh, so _now_ you’re being the bigger person?” Lena says, snidely, before pausing and lowering her voice slightly. “Sorry, that was out of order. I just meant - I thought you’d want to know, I guess. Whatever, Jared.”

Jared doesn’t say anything to that, just stares across the field and tries to pretend he’s not looking for a familiar face.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Caleb says from somewhere behind him.

“So,” Jared says. “Here we are.”

Here, is, of course, the LGBT night Jared very explicitly told Caleb he wouldn’t be attending. He’s still not entirely sure why he even bothered showing up, but he always feels kind of bad whenever Caleb starts waxing melancholy about how lonely he’ll feel without him, even though by now Caleb knows enough of the regulars to get by just fine without Jared.

He’s not sure where they are, exactly - a college house, of some description, and a pretty nice one all things considered (he already feels bad for the wreck it’ll undoubtedly be tomorrow) - just that there’d apparently been an open invitation. Or something like it, because no-one had seemed particularly bothered when they’d shown up.

“I knew I could count on you, buddy,” Caleb says, handing him a drink of something brightly coloured that makes Jared feel vaguely nauseous on sight.

“I’m staying for like an hour and then I’m going home,” Jared says, “I’m not playing your games tonight, Caleb.”

Caleb frowns.

“Why Jared,” he says, “I’m offended.”

Jared doesn’t dignify that with a response, just hands Caleb back the drink after he takes a tentative sip and decides he doesn’t want to risk alcohol poisoning. Caleb doesn’t seem the least bit bothered - if anything he’s pleased he now has a whole two drinks to his name -  and hovers awkwardly by Jared’s shoulder.

Usually the two of them would have at least attempted to drink something before showing up to the party, but Jared had spent most of the evening putting up a token protest about how ‘he didn’t even want to go out at all’ before he’d given in and let Caleb drag him out. It’s probably a good thing, too - Jared’s kind of getting sick of alcohol at the moment, and Caleb has a tendency to wander off once he’s had more than a couple of glasses of anything.

So they’re basically sober. It’s kind of an uncomfortable experience, given that pretty much everyone else in the house is at the very least tipsy, if not somewhere a little worse off on the sliding scale of drunkenness. It’s the kind of chaotic mess that stops being fun once you realise that there’s literally no way of escaping it whatsoever. Plus drunk people are only half as fun if you aren’t drunk too. That’s factual information, as far as Jared’s concerned.

Caleb’s still, somehow, in his element, by virtue of the fact that he tends to be in his element anywhere he has a drink in his hand. Jared’s taken to just watching him approach people and pretend to be surprised to find them there, despite the fact that it’s always the same people at these kind of things. It’s not exactly exciting, but he figures it’ll be enough to keep him occupied for the next twenty minutes or so, and provided that Caleb forgets he’s here (of which there’s about an eighty percent chance, by Jared’s reckoning), after that he should be good to just quietly slip away.

Obviously it’s at that point that Dustin decides to tap him on the shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd . this is the first time ive ever written jared ever so. forgive me. also forgive me for all the new characters. jared needed friends. my tumblrs @goldspill ..im posting a lot of absolute crap at the moment if that for some reason appeals to you
> 
> ALSO there were so so many really lovely comments last chapter i was overwhelmed by the positive feedback so THANK U......... so much. ok thats all. bye


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edited the previous chapter slightly - i forgot you can't actually get into clubs in the us until you're 21. it's a house party now. my bad

If they’d met under different circumstances, Jared would probably have liked Dustin.

It’s the first thing that comes to mind when he starts talking, obviously drunk, rambling and incoherent and way too quiet to make out under the din of the music, even though he’s clearly trying to be heard. He’s gesticulating wildly, fixing Jared with a gaze that seems way too pointed for someone as clearly out of it as he is.

Jared rakes his gaze across the crowded room, trying to catch Caleb’s eye, but for once Caleb’s social butterfly act seems to be working against him, because he’s way too engrossed in whatever conversation he’s having to notice Jared’s discomfort. He glances back at Dustin. He’s just staring at him, now, and Jared sighs, and jerks his head towards the back door. When he starts walking, Dustin follows.

Jared almost wishes he smoked, just so he’d have something to do with his hands. Instead he stands outside, back pressed up against the wall of the house, music pounding a steady rhythm, and waits for Dustin to start talking. He tries to time his breathing with the beat of whatever the hell it is they’re playing inside, partially because it’s something else to focus on, instead of whatever the fuck it is that’s happening here, and partially because he really is finding it hard to breath.

“This is so fucked,” Dustin says, only a little slurred.

It’s the first thing he’s ever actually said to him. Jared’s heard him talk, obviously, he’s even heard him say things _about_ him, because Dustin’s been there, he’s heard Jared shittalking Evan (and isn’t that just a fun little reminder of exactly what it is he’s probably talking about), and boy has he had words to say about that - but this is the first time the two of them have tried to have a civil conversation.

“You’re telling me, man,” Jared says. “You couldn’t have at least waited for me to get drunk?”

“Survey says that’s not such a great idea,” Dustin says, readily.

No points guessing who he got that impression from. Jared sucks a breath in through his teeth, and tries to smile.

“No offense, asshole, but last time I saw you you were taking creepy photos of me from across the room, so what do you want, exactly?”

“I am sorry about that,” Dustin says, “for what it’s worth.”

Jared waits him out. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, really, where he’s expecting the conversation to go. He’s not sure what he wants him to say, even, in an ideal world. Mostly he just wants the conversation to be over.

Dustin works his mouth like he’s not quite sure where he wants the conversation to go either.

“I’m Dustin,” he says, instead of anything meaningful or worthwhile, and awkwardly offers a hand.

“I know,” Jared says grimly, shaking it because it’s the best option out of a long list of shitty ones. “I’m Jared.”  
  
“I know,” Dustin parrots back. He’s not looking at him anymore, just staring off into the distance. “Evan’s been kinda torn up over you.”

“What?” Jared replies, dumbly.

Dustin shrugs, almost casual.

Jared had expected him to be angrier. He’d expected a fight.

He’d been gearing himself up for one, he’s beginning to realise, and he’s not sure how to relax now, how to stop tensing up, to stop the panicked fluttering in his chest, the feeling of being cornered. He’s not sure why they _aren’t_ fighting. They have every reason to be. Dustin deserves to be mad, Jared deserves to be pissed off. Instead he’s just tired, vaguely nauseous.

It’s not fair, really, that Evan still matters. That he still affects Jared’s life. Like he has any right to.

Jared sits down. He’s not sure why, because it implies a whole bunch of things he’s not sure he wants it to; that he’s prepared to have an actual conversation with this guy, that he’s going to be here a while, that he’s not going anywhere - but he does it anyway. The floor is damp. It’s something to focus on that isn’t Dustin, or Evan, or the situation he’s in in general, so Jared sits there and thinks about that instead.

Dustin takes a seat next to him. Jared doesn’t watch.

“Why are you here?” Jared asks.

He knows how he sounds - trying for a quiet monotone, politely disinterested, and very obviously fucking it up, overemotional and over-invested as ever - and tries not to let it bother him. He’s only good at faking it if he’s faking something else. He can’t fake feeling nothing at all.

Dustin shrugs again.

“LGBT night,” he says. “But that’s not what you mean.”

“No,” Jared says. “Not really.”

It’s not the most stilted conversation he’s ever had, but it comes close.

“Evan’s upset,” Dustin says. “Because of you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jared says, pulling his phone out of the pocket of his jeans and gazing blankly at the screen.

He could call Caleb. That would be the obvious solution, because the conversation is already heading in a direction he really, really doesn’t want it to be. He doesn’t want to hear a goddamn thing about Evan fucking Hansen. Not tonight, not ever. He’d known that’s what the talk was going to be about, of course, because a) that’s all anything’s ever about now, and b) Dustin is Evan’s friend and Jared’s been a complete and utter asshole to him. But he hadn’t - he’d been expecting a fight. He could handle a fight.

He doesn’t want to hear shit about how upset Evan is.

Jared’s spent nearly two fucking years being upset over Evan _fucking_ Hansen, so he’s not going to sit here and listen to some douchebag tell him how some stupid Twitter rant’s cut him deep, how badly he’s hurting, how Evan deserves an apology or whatever the hell it is that the he’s going to insist upon now.

“I think you should talk,” Dustin says.

“No.”

He laughs. “Yeah,” Dustin says. “I was pretty much expecting that.”

Jared furrows his brow, moves to say something, and that’s when Dustin stands up. He pauses, and then follows, because what else is he supposed to do? Everything feels way too companionable, way too casual, but his only other option is to stay where he is, and he’s not going to spend the rest of the evening sitting outside by himself. Dustin gives him a considering look, and then pats him on the shoulder. Jared stares back at him, blankly.

He’s not sure what exactly is going on, but he doesn’t like it.

“Sorry again,” Dustin says.

And then he walks off.

Jared resists the urge to follow him, to demand an explanation, to cause the kind of scene he was expecting all along. Instead he just watches him leave.

He doesn’t think Dustin was really that drunk after all.

He finds Caleb at the drinks table, unsurprisingly. Jared chews him out for it, but he quite willingly follows him out of the door, so he can’t have had that much to drink - when Caleb gets drunk it’s quite literally hell getting him to do anything he doesn’t want to, and drunk Caleb pretty much only ever wants to drink more. Instead he follows Jared back towards their dorm. It’s not bitterly cold outside but it’s not exactly warm either, and it seems to do the job of sobering Caleb up, at least a little. He doesn’t say anything, but it’s obvious he’s watching Jared. He’s never subtle, not at the best of times, and he might be more lucid now than he had been, but _more_ sober isn’t sober. It’s almost obnoxious, how blatantly concerned he is.

“What?” Jared asks, in the end, because the silence is starting to grate on him, and he knows Caleb was looking for an excuse to talk anyway. He always wants to talk.

“You okay?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Jared says. He knows the answer, and regrets asking the question almost immediately, because he’s probably going to answer it sincerely and he really didn’t mean it like that. He’s well aware. “That was a rhetorical question,” he says, before Caleb can reply.

“I worry,” He says anyway. “About you.”  
  
“Well, don’t,” Jared says, and he knows, he _knows_ he’s snapping at him, and that Caleb doesn’t deserve this, that he’s not the one he should be losing his temper with, but he’s so goddamn tired.

“Jared,” Caleb says, and this time it sounds like a warning.

They spend the rest of the walk back in silence.

 

* * *

 

Jared’s not an idiot. It’s something he tells himself a lot.

He’s a douchebag, sure, but it’s mostly intentional - he knows he’s doing it, he’s well aware of the impression he gives off, it’s cultivated. He spent years building himself into the person he is. Evan’s probably one of the only people who remembers, properly remembers the insecure little kid he used to be. He’s still insecure, sure, but now he’s an asshole. Now he deals.

He’s a master of self-reflection at this point, because it comes with the territory - that’s what you get when you hate yourself! Jared knows exactly who he is, exactly what he is, and he fucking hates it. But he _knows_.

So it’s not like he didn’t know he had a crush on Evan, back then.

 

* * *

 

“You’re upsetting an awful lot of people, lately,” Lena says to Jared when she hands him his frappuccino. She’s one of the people he’s been upsetting, so there’s no good reason for her to still be buying him coffee, especially when he never pays her back for it anyway. It hasn’t stopped her yet.

“I know,” he says. He doesn’t apologize, but it doesn’t seem like she’d been expecting him to anyway.

“Caleb’s your best friend. So stop being such a bitch to him.”

“I wasn’t trying to be,” Jared says, and it’s mostly true.

They’re sitting in the Starbucks just off campus, waiting for Caleb to finish whatever lecture he’s in. Jared should probably know, but he’s never been particularly good at keeping track of anyone’s timetable except his own. He’s not even all that great at keeping track of his own, honestly. Lena’s brought her laptop, though how much studying she’s actually going to get done in the half hour or so they have left is debatable. Jared hadn’t bothered - he has a phone and an internet connection, and he knows better than to pretend he’d even try to work anyway.

Lena blows the wrapper from her straw at his head. Jared doesn’t bother trying to move out of the way, because they come to Starbucks all the time, and Lena does this _all the time_ , and she never manages to blow it far enough to actually hit him. Today is no exception.

“Fuck’s sake,” she says.

“Dustin tried to talk to me last night,” Jared says, in lieu of a response.

“What?”

“Dustin,” Jared says, staring out of the window at the people walking by. “Evan’s friend.”

“No, I know that. Jared, what? Why didn’t you say anything? What the hell did he want?”

It’s raining. Caleb never checks the weather forecast, because Caleb never prepares for anything, which means there’s no way in hell he has a raincoat or an umbrella or anything at all that’s going to keep him dry. Jared’s not sure if it’s worth going to wait for him at his lecture hall - he’s pretty sure there’s an umbrella in his bag, and it’ll save Caleb bitching at him about getting wet later.

“Jared?” Lena repeats.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not a big deal. Caleb - he doesn’t have an umbrella. We should -”

Lena sighs. “Okay,” she says, quietly. “Sure, Jared.”

It’s not that he’s trying to be difficult. Really, he’s not, it’s just - Evan.

 

* * *

 

Caleb’s the first person he talks to about him, and it’s mostly out of guilt.

It’s not that Caleb’s been ignoring him - it’s not even like their relationship’s become strained or anything. Caleb’s not like that, he’s not that kind of guy. He’s still nothing but polite to Jared; still spends time with him, banters with him, invites him out. But it’s been a week, and there’s a tension there that there shouldn’t be, and Jared - Jared doesn’t know how to fix it. He knows why it’s happening, sure. It’s the same reason Lena’s irritated with him, though she’s more open about it, and in a way that’s easier to deal with - and he knows she’ll forgive him, eventually. That’s just how they are. Caleb, though, he’s less sure about.

It’s something that’s been building for a while. It’s not so much the fact that Jared refuses to be helped, refuses to talk, refuses to open up to anyone at all - it’s the fact that he does all of that and then takes it out on everyone around him. It’s not usually a big thing. Sometimes it is, because he’s overdramatic, and an asshole, and sometimes he needs to have a fight and other people just get caught in the blast radius - but it all adds up. Caleb gets the worst of it, because he’s a nice guy, and he’s always there, always trying to help, and Jared won’t stand for it. People worry about him and he revolts against it. It’s like he doesn’t even want to be liked, half the time. At least Lena calls him out on it, gets mad at him for it - Caleb just leaves him be. Or had been.

Jared hasn’t told anyone about Evan, really. People know he’s an old friend (ex-friend), they know they had a falling out - and that’s it. Maybe he’s let a few other things slip, but if he has no one’s asked about them. No one’s ever pried any further. Evan’s kind of an off-limits topic. Pretty much anyone who’s heard Jared mention him knows as much.

So talking to Caleb about him - that seems like a concession. Like something that might help. It’s not like it’ll make up for him being a dickhead, but Caleb’s his friend - he knows he’s an asshole. At least this way he’ll know he’s sorry, too.

They’re in Jared’s room, because Caleb’s still being unfailingly polite and Jared had given him some bullshit about studying to get him to stay there (though he has a sneaking suspicion he’d seen right through it). Jared has an empty word document open on his laptop, and he’s staring blankly at it instead of looking at Caleb, because it seems easier than acknowledging the fact that he’s actually going to have to talk about this. He’s spent a good year now ignoring the whole thing, hoping that if he just forgot about it, if he just tried really, really hard maybe one day he would wake up and it wouldn’t matter anymore. If he was just angry. If he could just be _angry_ instead of the rest of it, instead of sad, and guilty, and rejected, all the rest of it, the confusing mess of emotions Evan had left him - maybe he could stop caring so much.

He shuts his laptop. When he glances up to meet Caleb’s eyes he’s frowning back at him, more concerned than angry, and Jared can’t keep eye contact for more than a couple of seconds before he has to look away again.

It shouldn’t even matter. He shouldn’t even care.

“He was my best friend,” Jared says.

And then he explains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so. it's been a while. this chapter was beta'd by the wonderful [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic). i can, as always, be found on tumblr [@goldspill](http://goldspill.tumblr.com) if you want to stay updated on like... when stuffs gonna get posted. hopefully we should be back to at least a semi-regular update schedule now tho. probably
> 
> thanks for sticking around! sorry it took so long


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters this update! another after this one <3

Having Caleb on his side is less vindicating than he’d thought it would be.

Sure, at first it’d been great, to finally feel like someone else was recognizing the injustice of it all - to finally have actual, verbal confirmation that he wasn’t just making it all up, that he hadn’t been overreacting, that yes, he’d taken part in his fair share of bullshit, but that Evan had been just as bad. It hadn’t really lasted. Maybe it was the fact that Caleb really wasn’t the type to hold a grudge anyway - in a way it might have been better to tell Lena, who’d have been bitter and bitchy and spiteful, far more like Jared than anyone else he’s friends with, though she’d be loath to admit it - but it doesn’t feel like they’re presenting a united front against the face of Evan’s betrayal. It just feels like Jared’s overreacting.

It’s not that Caleb’s not been sympathetic. If anything he seems more understanding than ever, though he’s always been the one most willing to overlook Jared’s Evan-related issues. It’s just that now he has the full story, and it leaves Jared feeling kind of exposed. It’s like he doesn’t have anything to hide behind anymore. Caleb just...knows. And when he has the whole story it sounds kind of pathetic.

“Jared, please have a drink. This is sad, and creepy, and you know I don’t like feeling sorry for you. It gives me indigestion,” Lena says, kicking him in the side with more force than seems polite. “You’re killing my good vibes.”

Jared flips her the bird.

Lena had invited both he and Caleb round for pre-drinks, despite the fact that she’s the only one of them with any plans to actually go out for the evening. Caleb had insisted that Jared needed to do something other than sit around by himself thinking about Evan (‘because let’s be honest, Jared, that’s all you’re going to do if we just leave you to your own devices’), so - here they are. He’s sat at the foot of Lena’s bed, holding a can of unopened cider, still thinking about Evan, while Caleb and Lena drink themselves into an early grave around him.

“He just needs to get it out of his system,” Caleb says, reasonable as always. “You know how he gets.”

“Yes,” Lena says, tilting her can towards Jared meaningfully. “I do.”

Jared scoffs.

There’s a heavy pause, and then Caleb gives him a meaningful look.

That would be fine, except that Caleb’s a good four beers in now (Jared’s been keeping count), and has a surprisingly shitty alcohol tolerance for someone who drinks as much as he does. He’s not drunk, but he’s definitely not sober either, which means whatever the hell Caleb was trying to get across with the look is completely lost on Jared. He has no goddamn idea what he’s getting at, but Caleb keeps jerking his chin towards Lena like he’s expecting an answer, and Jared doesn’t even know what the question is.

The gesture, whatever the hell it’s meant to mean, isn’t exactly subtle, either.

“Caleb, what the fuck are you doing?” Lena asks.

Caleb purses his lips. It’s a losing battle, trying to figure him out, Jared knows that much already, so he gives a vague shrug in Caleb’s direction.

Caleb apparently takes this as a go-ahead, because he starts talking immediately.

“Jared’s going to speak to Evan,” he says.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Caleb,” Jared says, sitting up.

He can’t even be properly pissed off really, because he should’ve known it’d be _this_ kind of bullshit he was getting himself into. It’s like he can’t even go an hour without someone bringing up Evan Hansen. Usually himself, to be fair, but his friends are hardly any better.

“What? Jared, is this - is that true?”

“No,” he says. “Caleb thinks I should.”

And Dustin, he thinks. But no one else needs to know that part.

She frowns. “Fuck. Okay, hold on. Give me a second.” Pulling out her phone, she ducks out of the room into the hallway, already dialing a number.

Caleb at least has the decency to look sheepish. “I was trying to ask if you wanted her to know! I thought, since you had been sort of, well. Not fighting, exactly, but you know what the two of you are like. I thought it would help. You know she won’t tell anyone or anything, it’ll just stop her picking on you so much. Probably.”

“You know how sometimes you think you’re being helpful, when really you should probably just be sort of existing, and not affecting things? When you’ve reached that stage of drunkenness?” Jared says. “Yeah. Yeah, Caleb.”

Caleb sighs like a man defeated and knocks back the last dregs of his beer.

“You’re a cruel man, Jared.”

Jared, petty as ever, pulls the tab off his can of cider, and flicks it at Caleb’s head. He hadn’t been planning on drinking - he’d taken the can when he’d arrived just so he looked like he was joining in - but he’s starting to feel like he might need the alcohol after all.

Explaining that most of the reason you hate someone is because they stopped being your friend sounds kind of pathetic, when you get down to brass tacks.

Obviously there’s a hell of a lot more to the story than that, but while Jared may be spiteful he’s not a monster - he doesn’t want to ruin Evan’s life, and he doesn’t want to fuck things up for the Murphys anymore than he has done already. So The Connor Project - he never really explained that side of things to Caleb. And he doesn’t regret it. But it means he sounds like exactly as much of a loser as he is. It makes sense that Caleb thinks making up with Evan will fix things, that all of this is just because Jared never really got over his crush or what the fuck ever. That Evan ‘broke his heart’ because he got a girlfriend, and a new life, and stopped hanging out with Jared, and then even when he stopped having all that and everything went back to normal Jared still wasn’t good enough for him anymore. But, like, whatever. Even if that was true (and sure, fine, maybe that _is_ part of it, so sue him,) it’s not like talking things out with Evan would change anything.

Jared doesn’t need closure. He needs a fucking apology.

There’s a click, and Lena pushes the door back open.

“So I cancelled my plans,” she says. “We’re going to watch a movie, and I’m going to tell you what I think you should do, and you’re going to listen. And then we’re going to make a plan, because whatever you’re going to do, I’m not letting you do it alone. If your past actions are anything to go by you are physically incapable of having any kind of interaction with Evan that isn’t overwhelmingly hostile, so if there is even the slimmest possibility of you talking to him I want to know you’re capable of having just _one_ civil conversation. Just the one. I know you can act like a normal fucking human being, Jared, as infrequently as you do. I’m going to make sure you do.”

He zones out about half-way through the rant, because Lena’s rants always end up being an excuse to insult whoever it is she’s talking to - he knows exactly where it’s going. Instead, he latches onto the beginning of the speech - the ‘cancelled my plans’ part, because oh fuck, that means his whole evening is ruined. Not that his evening plans had been particularly glamorous, more the skulking around his room and then trawling Reddit half-drunk until 4am kind, but still. They hadn’t involved company past, like, 11pm, when Lena was meant to be leaving, he was meant to be getting some sweet, sweet alone time, so he could lie around and properly feel sorry for himself, and the pitiful state of his life.

“Okay,” Caleb says. “Netflix?”

Which is how they end up crowded around Lena’s beat-up Macbook watching Mamma Mia, because none of them could decide on a film, and Caleb ended up swiping the laptop while Jared and Lena were arguing over the merits of Zombieland - a film Jared’s not even sure he remembers watching, but wanted to fight over anyway. Mamma Mia’s a good movie though, and ABBA bangs. He’s hardly complaining.

They get through the first few musical numbers without any mention of Evan at all. Jared’s almost managed to convince himself that Lena might’ve forgotten about it all when she starts talking again.

“So,” she says. “You’re going to talk to Evan.”

“No,” Jared says, cutting her off immediately. “I’m not. I don’t even want to talk to him. Caleb thinks I should. _I_ think it’s a shitty idea, and even if it wasn’t a shitty idea I’m not going to do it anyway, so, case closed. Talk over.”

“So,” Lena says. “We’re going to try that one again.”

“This isn’t up for debate,” Jared says, “I’m not fucking around. It’s not happening, okay?”

“Can we at least talk about this?” Caleb tries, pausing the film and staring at him beseechingly. “I don’t understand why you’re suddenly so against it.”

“Because I’m sick of my life revolving around this one guy!” Jared says. “I thought you’d at least understand that, Caleb. I’m done with it, okay? I’m, I’ve done the whole public breakdown thing now, you know? Like, more than once, obviously, but like, on Twitter, the whole - it doesn’t matter. I’m finished. I just, I don’t want to do this anymore.” He’s almost surprised at how much he means it. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Okay,” Lena says.

He’s surprised she’s the first one to give in. Maybe it’s because she’s the one with less information, that she’s willing to give in, but Lena’s always the one to push, to get angry, to fight with him. She isn’t reasonable. She doesn’t just let things go.

Caleb seems less convinced.

“I don’t think you can just say you’re done and have it be done, Jared.”

“Fuck you, Caleb,” Jared says.

It’s meaner than is probably necessary, but Evan’s a touchy subject, as always, and Jared’s said _no_. He’s tired. It’s what’s hitting him the hardest, now, is how tired he is of all of it. So much of his time, his energy, his thoughts, so much of it is occupied by a guy who barely notices him, who barely recognized his absence. He’s sick of wasting his life caring about someone who doesn’t.

“No, I’m being serious, Jared, hear me out,” Caleb says. “Please.”

“You have a minute,” Jared says, staring at the digital clock Lena keeps on the dresser next to her bed. “Go.”

“You need to clear the air. I know you probably think you don’t, that you can move on without ever needing to acknowledge any of it, but you can’t, Jared. It’s gonna come back to bite you in the ass. How long has this been going on, now? You can’t just decide it’s over, not after all of this.”

“Time,” Jared says, a minute late, but doesn’t bother trying to stop Caleb when he keeps talking.

“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear it. Just - I think, if you had just one conversation. Just, apologize. Not for all of it, but just, the stuff that happened, the past couple of months. You don’t have to make up or anything. You just have to talk.”

Jared takes a sip of his cider, and wonders if it’d be too much to storm out. He’s not even sure he disagrees with Caleb’s assessment, really - he knows how badly stuff gets to him. He’s not the kind of person who can just let stuff go. It’s so easy to say he’s done, though, that he’s finished, that this is it now and that he’s not going to so much as think about Evan anymore. He knows it’s not true, he just doesn’t want to hear it. Especially not from Caleb.

“I don’t know if I _can_ talk to him,” he says.

 

* * *

 

If Jared uses Twitter almost religiously, his Instagram gets updated maybe once in a blue moon, and only then when his hand is forced.

Lena’s essentially taken control of his account, despite his protests (half-hearted), and derives an ungodly glee in curating the least aesthetically pleasing profile ever. All the photos he uploads are ugly as hell, brightly coloured monstrosities even before the shitty filters she adds (Caleb’s convinced she has a list of them ranked best to worst, and is working her way through them all, bottom up). The most recent addition is no exception, a candid of him and Caleb, both in some god-awful hawaiian shirts they’d gotten the year before for some themed party but had never stopped wearing. Caleb’s throwing up an overly-enthusiastic peace sign, ruffling Jared’s hair with the other hand. Jared’s trying valiantly to look composed, holding something that looks like it was _maybe_ supposed to be a martini.

The one saving grace of having a rarely-updated Instagram account is having very few followers, which means that the photo has only a handful of likes, and the only comment (other than the ones Jared himself has posted) is from Alana.

 **j.kleinman** stylin  
**alanabeck** The shirt really suits you, Jared.  
**j.kleinman** thx alana

It’s not that the two of them have an antagonistic relationship, really.

The fact that Jared has a relationship with Alana at all is kind of an achievement, given his part in the whole ‘bullshit email thing’ (he’s not sure she was ever technically told about his involvement but, really, was Evan gonna have managed it alone?). The Connor Project was something Alana had been genuinely passionate about. And to be fair, it’s not that Jared hadn’t cared about it - in theory, sure, raising awareness of the epidemic that is teenage suicide seems like a pretty legitimate cause or whatever. But that wasn’t what it had been about, for him. Or Evan.

So their relationship is strained. The light teasing - it’s probably just that, and if it’s not it doesn’t matter, because Jared’s in no place to judge, and even if he was he doesn’t really care. Alana’s one of the good ones. He doesn’t really understand why she even bothers keeping in touch with him, really - he keeps giving her opportunities to drop contact, and she keeps not taking them. It’s not like she’s treating him like some kind of pet project either, some kind of troubled kid she can reform. Jared’s hardly troubled in the first place. He’s an _opportunist_. Regardless, as far as Alana’s concerned she just seems to want to treat him as an acquaintance she keeps at an arm's length - and they’re both okay with that.

It’s just a little weird. He can do weird, though, weird’s the basis for, like, all of his relationships nowadays, because he can’t hold down a relationship that’s functionally normal. But it’s been a long time since The Connor Project. And as much as he doesn’t want to admit it he’s been taking stuff out on Alana, too, even though all of the shit with Evan - that’s never had anything to do with her. It’s not just the situation that’s been making things difficult. It’s him.

He should probably try to fix that.

 

* * *

  


**Jared Kleinman  
** Hey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case you missed the note at the beginning of the chapter - two chapters this update, so another after this. beta'd by the wonderful [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic). i can be found on tumblr at [goldspill](http://goldspill.tumblr.com). sorry for the wait!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the second of the two chapters in this update - if you haven't read the first, go back a chapter & read that one!

It’s like once Jared starts considering talking to Evan - and it’s considering in the loosest sense of the term, because he still thinks it’s the worst idea in the world and he’d rather cut out his own tongue than try, at this point - he just stops showing up places.

It’s not that they were ever a staple in each other’s lives or anything like that, not by any means, and yes, okay, at least at first it was mostly Jared’s fault that they kept seeing each other anyway, always loitering around places he knew Evan would be just so he could make comments about how much he didn’t want to be seeing Evan. But then he stopped wanting to see Evan, stopped wanting all the reminders of their friendship, of The Connor Project, of the whole fucking _thing,_ and still Evan had seemed impossible to avoid. Maybe it was just that their meetings had stuck out, the way everything that related to Evan seemed to, fun little reminders that, yes, Jared was still an idiot, still hung up on stuff that doesn’t matter, still compromised by feelings he should’ve killed off years ago. Now Evan’s a ghost.

Jared had his Twitter meltdown, and then his conversation with Dustin, and then Evan vanished.

Or, not vanished, because that’s ridiculous. Evan’s clearly fine - Jared’s not an idiot, he knows how to use the internet. He’s checked Evan’s Facebook, his Twitter, and Evan doesn’t care for privacy settings (and if he did he’s too friendly and too scared of upsetting people by forgetting their names to _not_ add people with names he doesn’t recognise, so creating a fake profile to add Evan would be child’s play, but you know, whatever,) so he knows Evan’s still out there doing his thing - he’s just not doing it places Jared can see.

And that’s bugging him. Not least because it’s fucking with his theoretical conversation plans (not apology plans, to be clear, because he still doesn’t owe Evan an apology), and even if he doesn’t actually want to have a conversation with him he’d still like to keep his options open, but because it’s a change, and it’s one he wasn’t expecting. Sure, having Evan hate him, or dislike him, or whatever - it fucking sucked, but at least it was something. Now Evan’s just not there, and the indifference (because that’s what it feels like) - that’s worse than hatred.

What are you even supposed to do about a situation like that? Jared can’t reach out to him, text him, send him a Facebook message, can’t catch him waiting for his lecture or something. Or he could, theoretically, but it’d fuck everything up. It’s not like Jared’s social media interactions with Evan have inspired much confidence thus far, and knowing Evan’s academic schedule just reads as kind of creepy, even before he starts following him to his labs (what do you even do at an ecology lab in the first place?) just to wait for him to finish. Jared doesn’t have options.

“We need to take you out,” Lena says. “Outside. Let’s go bowling or something. We can’t have you sitting around doing all this.”

“What’s ‘this’?” Jared asks. “What are we implying, here? Because whatever it is I resent it. I don’t need to be babied. I feel like at least half the conversations we have nowadays are about how sad I look.”

“You look really sad, Jared,” Lena says. “I know the Evan situation is grating on you but it’s, like, taking over your whole life, and I don’t get it. You have a degree, you have friends, you have hobbies. It doesn’t need to be like this. You don’t need to be like this.”

“I’m not slacking, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’m acing discrete math right now. I have free time like you would not _believe_.”

“That’s not as impressive as you think it sounds,” Lena says. “It’s just proving my point. You need more than studying and the stuff Caleb forces you to do.”

“She’s right,” Caleb says, piping up from the couch. “Even I’m not up to speed on discrete math, and I used to be such a nerd. Like, biggest loser in my class. Do you want that kind of a reputation, Jared?”

“This is the dumbest form of blackmail in the world,” Jared says. “Come on then.”

There’s a bowling alley a 10 minute bus ride away from campus, in the town center. Jared’s been a handful of times since he started college, usually with the rest of his house, and once with some of the other comp sci undergrads, as some kind of bonding thing. It’s not exactly a classy establishment, but it’s cheap enough, and that’s what counts when you’re living on a student budget. He can’t afford to be picky.

He stands, and tries to figure out where the hell he left his wallet.

 

* * *

 

“You’re cheating,” Kavita says, moving her token along six spaces on the board.

“I’m not cheating,” Jared says. “How do you even cheat at Monopoly in the first place? _Why_ would I even cheat at Monopoly in the first place?”

“I do it,” Lena says, filing her nails nonchalantly. “It keeps things interesting.”

“Again,” Jared says. “It’s _Monopoly_.”

“If you’re not going to take this seriously I expect you to martyr yourself for the good of the people later,” Caleb says, slinging an arm over his shoulders. “And by ‘the people’ I mean me.”

Lena seems content to take her turn in silence, which Jared is only now realising is probably because if no one’s paying attention to her it better allows her to cheat. He doesn’t mention it, and Caleb seems pretty on the ball anyway.

“We’re not going to let you do that,” Kavita says. “I’m sorry, Jared.”

“It’s alright. I think I’ll live without.”

He stands up and heads over to the sink, pouring himself a glass of water and then hopping up to sit on the counter, content to let the other three duke it out without him.

“Consider me out,” he says. ”I know a lost cause when I see one.”

“Boo!” Caleb says, “You have to see it through to the end, you can’t just leave because you know you’re gonna lose! Besides, I wanna rub it in your face when I kick your ass.”

Jared sighs, but when he returns to the couch he’s grinning.

“You’re such a smug asshole sometimes,” he says.

 

* * *

 

If Jared’s life was just studying and sleeping, it’d probably be okay. It’s the social stuff that’s the problem, because instead of going to anything ‘cultured’ - theatre productions, art shows, any of the many and varied events he’s sure exist for other, better college students - he just goes to parties. It’s Caleb’s fault. Caleb’s and Lena’s, except Lena doesn’t insist on dragging him along with her every time she wants to do something. Caleb, however, doesn’t _have_ another best friend, and for some godforsaken reason seems incapable of doing things alone. Therefore parties, therefore a shitty social life and a shitty academic career, because basically every time he goes to one of the damn things he either ends up leaving early, because it fucking sucks, or he finds himself waking up the next morning with the worst hangover of his life and a Twitter feed that makes him want to shoot himself in the head. Either way he loses a hell of a lot of valuable time.

So no, he’s not best pleased that he’s at another one.

“Yo, Jared!” Someone yells from across the room, a girl he sort of recognizes from one of his modules, and he waves in return, wandering idly over.

“Hey,” he says, trying and failing to come up with a name. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Parties aren’t really my thing, but it’s been a while, and all the coursework’s been getting to me, and I guess I just needed a break from it all, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jared says, except work _is_ the break, for him.

He gently excuses himself from the conversation after a few brief minutes of small talk and tries to figure out what exactly he’s trying to achieve in being here. He kind of just wants to get drunk. He’s been basically teetotal for a while now, since the whole Twitter debacle, and while it’s probably been sensible it’s also meant putting up with a lot of really dull social events. It’s kind of ridiculous how awkward it gets trying to constantly justify your not-drinking, especially when you used to have kind of a reputation for it, at least in your own social circles.

The party isn’t actually an LGBT night, for once - Caleb said something about it being a mixer for science undergrads, organised by some of the other sophomores, but Jared hadn’t been paying too much attention to the explanation. He was getting dragged along regardless as to what it actually was, so it’s not like it mattered, really. He’d try and mingle for a couple of hours, leave as soon as seemed appropriate, and everyone would be happy.

Caleb, as usual, is already long gone - Jared’s his best friend, and if he’d asked he’d definitely have stayed with him, but Caleb enjoys parties, he enjoys socializing, and Jared’s not going to ask him to sacrifice his evening just so he can feel a little less awkward. The party would probably suck even with Caleb there, so at least one of them should be able to enjoy themselves. He heads towards the drinks table, grabs a beer from one of the coolers, and tries to find someone he recognizes who isn’t, like, Dustin. He really doesn’t need a repeat of that whole thing.

No one else from his house is meant to be at the party, as far as he’s aware - except Eric, maybe, but Eric’s a dickhead, and you couldn’t pay Jared to spend more than five minutes talking to him - so it would only really be classmates, and honestly Jared probably hasn’t gotten to know any of them as well as he should’ve done, aside from Caleb.

Still, after a couple of minutes of awkward wandering he finds a group of guys he remembers explaining some stuff from scientific fundamentals to, having a conversation about some TV show he’s never heard of before. He tells them as much.

“Okay, look - bear with me here,” one of the guys - Mikey, Jared’s pretty sure - says. “Are you _sure_ you want to get into this? Because I’m happy to explain, but I’m warning you that you’ll probably be here all night. I’m just, weirdly invested.”

“I have literally nothing better to do with my time,” Jared says. “Go for it.”

After that, most of the evening is spent drifting between groups of people he’s vaguely familiar with, and the drinks table. He’s not drunk - he’s not letting himself get to that point, probably won’t for a long time now, but he’s pleasantly buzzed, and he’s spoken to at least four different groups of people this evening, all of whom seemed genuinely pleased to see him, and it’s just - nice. It’s a change.

He’d seen Atif, at one point, lingering by the door, and the fear and nausea he’d been hit with had been almost overwhelming. It’s not like Atif had ever done anything to him, even, other than befriend Evan, but - after Dustin, can anyone blame him for being paranoid? Regardless, he disappeared after that, and once an hour had gone by with no more sign of him Jared had finally begun to relax again.

It’s maybe half past midnight when Jared decides he needs a break.

All things considered the party was kind of great, at least considering how low his expectations had been - he hadn’t been cornered by any of Evan’s shitty friends, hadn’t been stuck in a corner by himself all evening, hadn’t gotten wasted and ended up having some awful, embarrassing breakdown everyone had to politely ignore the next morning. The bar was so low, but still. Caleb’s still inside, somewhere, and will probably stay until he’s kicked out - he sent Jared a text saying as much about half an hour ago, which Jared assumes is permission for him to leave as and when he feels like it.

So it’s not that he’s stressed, or anxious, or that he’s had a shitty time or anything - he’s feeling pretty good, when he leaves the house.

He gets maybe a couple feet out the door before he has to stop, because there’s someone sat perched on the wall that borders the sidewalk, and he fucking _knows_ that guy. Of course he does.

Evan hasn’t noticed him, which would be his cue to turn tail and get the hell out of dodge, if it weren’t for the fact that it kind of looks like Evan’s about to lose his shit. In the panic-attack way specifically, something Jared can still apparently recognize, despite the fact that it’s been a long-ass time since he’s seen _that_ last go down. It’s enough to make Jared’s own chest tighten sympathetically, as though he wasn’t already having enough trouble breathing.

The thing is it’s… really not Jared’s problem. At all. Evan doesn’t know he’s here, Evan doesn’t need his help, Evan probably doesn’t want Jared’s help. Their relationship is a bad one, it’s not - Jared’s not exactly a positive fucking force in Evan’s life right now. He’s not going to be able to sit there and tell Evan to breathe deep and think calm thoughts or whatever the hell he wants to believe he can do to fix this. Because he does want to believe he can help, of course he does, despite everything he doesn’t hate Evan, he doesn’t want the guy to suffer, he’s not a complete asshole. But it’s not like that anymore, and even if he _was_ going to talk to Evan - which, still not going to happen - now would not be the time.

Except then Evan’s leant over, shaking, and Jared has to do something, he’s the only one out here and - fuck.

“Do you have your meds on you?” He asks as he half-jogs over, unthinkingly, because that’s what he always asks when Evan gets like this.

He doesn’t even know if Evan takes meds anymore.

He feels stupid for asking, for assuming, for introducing himself like that - the whole thing, he immediately wants a do-over. It’s the first time he’s said anything to Evan in over two years, and he didn’t even think about it. It feels hideously unfair. He had it all planned out, has done ever since they first fell out, the righteous indignation over the years of friendship Evan had thrown away, the apology he was going to demand, the whole damn cinematic event, and instead it’s _just_ like before, just like it’s always been - him caring.

Evan looks up, and the crack in his voice is audible when he says, “Jared?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't say i never do anything for you guys. 
> 
> beta'd by the lovely [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic). i can be found on tumblr at [goldspill](http://goldspill.tumblr.com) if u wanna talk. i have a lot to say & i love talking abt this fic! and deh in general lol. send me an ask. hopefully next update should come a little sooner lmao


	10. Chapter 10

“Um,” Jared says, and then says again a few times, over and over, because his brain is working at half speed and he’s all caught up just watching Evan’s face and it’s making it really hard to concentrate. “Yeah.”

Evan grimaces, his eyes flicking between Jared and the ground like he’s not sure if looking at him is worse than blatantly avoiding eye contact. In the end he settles for hunching in on himself further, leaning over to reach for a bag by his feet, a dark shape Jared hadn’t even realized he’d had with him, too focused on everything else, the more important things, on Evan. He pulls out a pill bottle, full of tablets Jared has time to vaguely recognize before he averts his gaze and tries not to stare.

He hears the sound of rattling for about a minute, maybe two, before there’s a frustrated sigh, the sound of Evan’s breath hitching slightly, damp and wet like he’s going to cry. And fuck, he’s really not prepared to deal with _that_ , thank you very much.

“Evan?” Jared calls out, glancing towards him.

He’s holding the bottle tight in one hand, knuckles just beginning to turn white. The other is pressed up against his forehead, like he’s trying to physically suppress a headache. He’s not crying, but he looks like he’s prepared to.

“Can I help?” Jared asks, feeling like an idiot as soon as he says it.

Evan startles, looks up, and meets his eyes, properly, for the first time in a long, long while.

“Uh - what?” he says, and then, fumbling as he presses the bottle forward into Jared’s open palms. “Can you just - I can’t, the cap.”

Evan holds up his hands, shaking slightly like leaves in a brisk wind, as though Jared might need proof that he really _is_ incapable of doing it himself, that he’s not just asking for help because he thought it would be fun, or because he’s deliberately choosing to inconvenience him or something.

“Yeah,” Jared says. “I got it.”

He twists off the cap so it sits loosely atop the bottle and hands it back to him. He doesn’t think about things like skin contact, or the fact that the bottle’s still the same one that Evan’s been using for years now, refilling it every time he gets a new prescription instead of just using the new one, because Jared had decorated it with stupid stickers one time and that had been reason enough to keep it.

“Thanks,” Evan says, all quiet.

He swallows the tablet dry, before Jared has the chance to offer to head back inside to grab some water or something, and he tries hard not to cringe. Evan had always hated taking them like that, ever since he’d read that stupid article about them burning holes through your throat or whatever. It had always been a point of contention between them, mostly because Jared was of the opinion that the whole thing was fear-mongering bullshit and ‘no excuse to avoid taking your meds just because you don’t have a drink, _Evan’_. He doubts Evan’s opinions have changed much, though.

Everything feels wrong.

Jared keeps trying to cling to the threads of his anger that remain, the frustration and bitterness and spite that are the backbone of everything he has left with Evan. It’s what he knows; it’s safe, and familiar, and he doesn’t want to feel sorry for him. He doesn’t want to be anything but angry with him, because he still wants his goddamn apology somewhere along the line. He still deserves one.

Jared wishes he’d had more to drink. He wishes he’d never left the party.

“I’m just gonna go,” he says, inflectionless because he doesn’t know how the words are meant to sound in his mouth.

He waits for Evan to say something, because it seems wrong to just walk off and leave him like this - just in case (in case of what exactly he isn’t sure, but his mind’s having trouble latching onto anything solid at the moment, everything sliding over itself like sand on sand on sand, so he’s not thinking too hard about it). He doesn’t.

“Evan?” Jared asks, taking a step towards him. He’d reach out, but he has a feeling that would be a mistake.

“Um,” he says. It’s hard to hear him over the heavy bass from the party, Evan’s voice thin and weary, small like he’s not sure he cares whether or not Jared even hears him in the first place. “Can you stay? I just - I can’t.”

It feels like Jared’s mind should trip over itself, there. Something should trigger, some kill switch, a fuse should blow, that something should go wrong, because Evan shouldn’t want anything to do with him right now. Jared’s done his bit - he’s checked up on him, he’s made sure he’s taken his meds. Evan seems stable, or at least some semblance of it. There’s no reason for him to be here anymore. It feels like Evan has a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.

Jared’s heart stutters, just a little, and in the dark parts of his mind he thinks to himself what a stupid fucking mistake it is that he’s making, yet again, doing anything at all for Evan Hansen. He’s pathetic.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Jared watches Evan in silence as he puts his meds away, returns his rucksack to the floor by his feet, nudging it with his foot like he’s just looking for something to do.

“It’s, um,” Evan says, stumbling over his words like he’s just trying to get it over with, like if he doesn’t say it all now he might never. “It wasn’t the party, really. It’s just, stuff with Dustin, and I think I might be failing one of my classes and - and my mom. And you.”

This is his opening for an apology, then. He’s not going to take it.

If they hadn’t been friends for years, Jared probably would’ve missed the way Evan’s expression tightens, slightly, starts to seem just a little more forced after the pause, the moment he realizes Jared’s not going to say anything. He doesn’t start to tear up, or shake. He doesn’t get mad. The change is so minute it’s almost unnoticeable. He probably knew better than to get his hopes up.

Jared still feels ill. He wishes he hadn’t bothered trying.

For all that Evan’s putting on a brave face, it’s obvious the meds have yet to kick in; he’s pale, washed out, keeps staring off into the distance like he’s having trouble comprehending anything around him.

“What do you need me to do?” Jared says.

“Can you just - talk?” Evan asks, barely looking in his direction. “Anything, it doesn’t matter what, I just need to think about something that isn’t…”

He trails off. Jared doesn’t bother trying to fill in the gaps himself. He could, if he wanted to - he knows Evan. He doesn’t want to know this.

“Okay,” he says, tired and sick to death of everything. “Okay, Evan.”

So he talks.

At first it’s just stupid bullshit, because that’s what he’s best at - filling the silence with words that don’t actually mean anything at all. It’s all true, of course - he talks about monopoly, bowling, the movies, pretty much everything he’s done recently that he considers vaguely interesting and also unlikely to be potentially upsetting - but the narratives he constructs are just that. They’re fabrications designed to entertain, to make Evan feel better. Jared’s a performer. He’s not talking about any of this because it means anything.

He can only keep it up for so long, though. Maybe it’s because he’s tired, or because he’s spent the whole evening playing a part - maybe it’s just because he’s been drinking. But once he runs out of meaningless crap to talk about he keeps going anyway.

Jared’s not exactly an introvert. He’s a talkative guy, he’s got shit to say, he’s hardly shy - but talking at length? Talking about personal things, even just stuff he cares about, that’s never been straightforward. Anything with emotional weight to it is off the table, as far as he’s concerned. The second it gets past the superficial suddenly talking becomes very, very hard. So Jared doesn’t do it.

It’s always been easy with Evan. Apparently some things never change.

So no, Evan probably doesn’t even register it as different, when Jared starts talking about his comp sci course - and why would he? It’s not as though Jared goes about loudly proclaiming that yet again, here he is conceding ground to the one person he claims to hate, in some half-hearted attempt to keep him together for an evening.

It helps, though, Jared’s rambling (and it is rambling - he can hardly be expected to be fully coherent now, after everything). Evan’s breathing evens out, and he starts to sit up, releases his hands from where they’d been curled up tight in the fabric of his shirt. Jared won’t admit it, but he starts to breathe a little easier too.

He shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other, pulls his phone out of his back pocket to glance at the time. It’s late. He shouldn’t still be here - he doesn’t want to still be here.

“Are you… okay?” Jared asks.

He never hesitates, when he talks.

“Yeah,” Evan says. “I think, um. I’m going to go now? Dustin’s said he’s going to come get me, so. Um. Thanks, you know - for all that.”

Jared knows a dismissal when he sees one.

“Okay,” he says. “And it was no big deal. Bye, Evan.”

“Bye, Jared.”

And then Jared starts walking, and he doesn’t stop until he’s back in his room. He doesn’t let himself think, even, until he’s showered and brushed his teeth and plugged in his phone to charge, and then he sits down on the edge of the bed, and he stays there, gazing blindly out of his window until he’s too tired to keep his eyes open any longer, and then he goes to sleep.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t tell Caleb or Lena.

He already knows it’s a mistake, knows the minute he greets Caleb the next morning and doesn’t immediately open his mouth to spill everything, but whenever he tries forming the words they die in his throat. Evan, the way he was last night - if he talks about it, it’ll feel like he’s giving something up. Caleb and Lena have expectations, now, of how their first meeting should be, and that’s fine, that’s whatever. Jared doesn’t care, he can live with that, but it’s not fair, really, on Evan. For them to be forming opinions on him, based on Jared’s explanation - if their first impressions of him are based off how he was yesterday. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s completely irrational, of all the reasons to not be talking to them about it it’s potentially the least convincing one in the world, but every time Jared thinks about having to explain the way Evan had asked him, voice thick and shaky, to stay - he can’t.

Maybe he’s brooding, just a little.

“You were having so much fun at the party!” Lena says, exasperated, as they walk towards the lecture halls. “Is it the hangover? Did we drive you to drink?”

“A bit,” Jared says. “Why is the alcohol at those parties always so shitty?”

“All alcohol is shitty,” Caleb says. “It’s alcohol.”

Jared sighs. The lack of sleep is getting to him. He’s almost tempted to just bail on his lecture, head back to his room - he hadn’t been lying when he’d told Caleb before that he’d been more than on top of his work. He knows his shit. Comp sci’s basically all that’s keeping him sane right now, god forbid - but then Caleb will know something’s up, even more than he does now.

When he says getting through the day is a chore, he means it’s a _chore_ . It takes a herculean amount of effort, almost literal blood, sweat, and tears, and by the end of it Jared’s convinced he needs like seven days of sleep. After lectures they break for lunch, though Jared wastes most of it on his phone, reading Caleb the stupid shit he has to see on Twitter. It’s not that the work itself is particularly difficult, or hard to follow or whatever - he just can’t focus. None of it sticks, and Caleb can tell, which means he’s constantly trying to _get_ Jared to focus, which means Jared’s constantly having to try and force himself to try and pay attention, which he’s constantly failing to do because his mind’s stuck on Evan goddamn Hansen, as per usual.

At least this time he has an excuse.

He’s barely conscious when he leaves the lab a couple of hours later. He’s hardly accomplished anything at all - not that he really needed to, it was an optional thing, and he’d been there to keep Caleb company more than anything else - so when he gets back to his room he’s fully intending on sequestering himself away for the rest of the afternoon, and probably the whole evening too, if he can get away with it. He waves Lena off, despite her protests - she’d been talking about making pasta or something, pooling together what’s left of their groceries (and really they’re due a trip out to the store, because tomato soup is basically all he has left and it’s not going to do for the next three days straight), but Jared gives her a half-hearted excuse about still feeling nauseous and it’s enough for her to let him go.

He locks the door when he gets back to his room, because if he doesn’t he knows people will take it as an open invitation to just sort of show up, and collapses onto his bed.

It’s hard to tell if he’s coping or not. It’s only been a day, and it’s not like talking to Evan should be some life-changing, revolutionary act - but it’s something he’d been thinking about for a long, long time. Now it’s happened, and the whole thing was wrong, and he just sort of has to deal with that.

It was so easy, to fall back into old habits. It’s his own fault, and he can try to blame it on the alcohol, on guilt, on pity, but in the end it’s all the same. Jared has a huge, glaring vulnerability and Evan doesn’t even need to know about it to exploit it, because he’s the whole fucking thing, still. Somehow.

He sighs, reaches into the pocket of his jeans, and pulls out his phone.

**Jared Kleinman  
** hey alana  
so

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we stan an icon. beta'd by [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic). i can be found on tumblr at [goldspill](https://goldspill.tumblr.com), where i am routinely both obnoxious and a bastard. sometimes both at once


	11. Chapter 11

Evan’s tired.

“Hey, Kendall,” he says, and winces at the dry pain that immediately follows. He should be drinking more water. It’s the sort of thing his mom would usually remind him to do.

They’re sat in a coffee shop about a 10 minute walk off campus, a little pricier than Evan would’ve liked, but it's got the whole hipster/organic/probably vegan place vibe going for it that probably hikes the cost of basically everything in the place way up, and a vague aesthetic he can’t quite figure but that’s presumably meant to make it look ‘cultured’. It’s quieter than the Starbucks they usually go to at least, which means they can sit in relative peace, and Evan can about be as certain as he ever gets that Jared’s not going to show up. Which is never as certain as he’d like.

“So how’ve things been?” Kendall asks, but not like it’s actually a question - more like she just needs clarification on quite how bad things are going for him.

“They’ve been okay,” Evan says. “I went to a party.”

It’s not meant to sound like a bad thing, but from the look he gets he suspects it very much does.

Kendall hums but doesn’t actually say anything, just sips placidly at her coffee and starts drawing on her napkin. Evan can’t really tell what it’s meant to be, but whether that’s because he’s looking at it from the wrong side of the table or just because Kendall’s a terrible artist is anyone’s guess. He’s glad he has something to look at that isn’t her.

“Okay,” he begins, slipping into the awkward kind of ramble he always does when he’s talking about something he doesn’t want to. “There was a party for some of the science undergrads. Which, you know, I didn’t want to go to. But Dustin and Atif said they’d be there, and it was going to be a whole thing if I didn’t show, so I figured it was whatever. And it was fine, like it was only a party, but I don’t know I guess at some point I just got kind of overwhelmed? So I went outside and sat on the, you know, the little brick walls they sometimes have out the front of houses, and I just took a minute.”

“Evan,” Kendall says, like she’s talking to a wild animal she really doesn’t want to spook, “are you okay? Like, was there no-one there to help or -”

Evan laughs, the sound high pitched and sticky in his throat, because there’s nothing else for it other than to explain, because avoiding the question is only going to make things worse later on, and if he trusts anyone with this it’s Kendall.

“No, um, that’s - that’s the funny thing, actually, is that Jared was at the party. And he I guess was leaving the party, then, and he found me, um, having a panic attack, or I was about to have one, so.”

Kendall doesn’t say anything for a moment, just puts the lid of her pen back on and absentmindedly straightens the napkin she’d been drawing on out, flattens it with her palms. It doesn’t fix the creases.

The hot chocolate Evan’s been drinking is still warm where it sits cupped between his hands, and he stares at it instead of finally looking at Kendall, because it seems safer. He knows she’s going to be judging him, even though she doesn’t mean to, and he knows she’s going to rationalise it away as being because she cares, because she’s worried about him, but that’s not going to make it sting any less.

“What happened?” she asks.

Evan presses a nail into one of the long grooves running along the table, hard enough that the pressure starts to feel uncomfortable instead of grounding.

“Nothing, really,” he says, and when he lifts his gaze to meet her eyes he’s not lying even a little bit. “He just talked until I calmed down and then he left. We didn’t have, like, a conversation or anything.”

“But it’s the first time you’ve spoken to him, right?”

Evan doesn’t respond, something sitting ugly and heavy in his gut, clogging up his throat like tar. It’s answer enough.

“If he’s done anything,” Kendall begins, the words catching like she’s stumbling over them, except that’s not the kind of thing she does and instead they just come out a little fast. “If he said anything to you -”

“He didn’t,” Evan says. “He just talked.”

She sighs.

Evan presses his nail deeper into the groove he’d been worrying at, wonders how many other people have sat in the exact same spot as him and done the exact same thing he’s doing right now. How many confessions have been conducted in his seat.

“It’s fine,” he says, when Kendall doesn’t respond. “I’m okay.”

He doesn’t even sound like he’s convincing himself, but Kendall nods and agrees with him and it feels like he’s gotten away with something he shouldn’t have.

 

* * *

 

 

Evan goes three whole days without seeing Jared, and it feels both longer and shorter than it should.

He’s heading back from a lecture, still trying to puzzle through everything they’d been taught, trying to make the pieces fit together in his head the way they should, the way he knows they do for everyone else. Everything feels much harder, lately. He spends half his time trying to tell himself he’s not slipping, he’s not throwing everything away, that he’s good enough and he deserves to be here and that things will be okay. He’s never been much good at positive thinking, though.

Jared’s sitting on a bench by the building Evan’s pretty sure is the engineering department, staring at his phone. It’s a startlingly familiar sight, and he feels like he’s been thrown back four years into the past, except Jared looks taller now and more tired and Evan doesn’t know him at all.

He pauses awkwardly, feels someone almost collide with his back and mutter something aggressively under their breath, but he doesn’t have time to think about it. He watches Jared instead, typing something far quicker than Evan could ever manage with his clumsy fingers and run-together thoughts.

He’s not sure whether he wants him to look up or not.

He does anyway, maybe because Evan’s been staring just a little too long or maybe just because that’s the way things happen sometimes, without cause or reason. Jared blinks for a second, like he’s not sure what he’s looking at, and then meets Evan’s gaze squarely - frowns, but only in the way you do when something’s far away or confusing, not because you’re angry.

Evan feels like he should do something - try to make an excuse, or pretend he’s not actually watching him, or even just leave, walk away and hope Jared doesn’t care as much as he probably does. It feels voyeuristic just standing there staring, but it’s like his internal processes have gotten all caught up in themselves and he’s just stuck there, frozen, trying not to look as devastated as he feels.

The moment passes, and then Jared’s looking at his phone again instead of at him. It’s almost like it never happened at all, except his brow looks a little more furrowed, his expression a little tighter, the kind of minute changes no-one would notice unless they’d known someone very intimately, or for a very long time. Evan’s got both going for him.

He hoists his backpack up on his shoulder, straightens his posture, and keeps walking.

 

* * *

 

 

Here’s the thing: it’s really hard for Evan, at the moment.

Not just because of Jared (though it’s always because of Jared), but because there are fifteen hundred other problems he’s wrestling with right now, and none of them are going down without a fight. Dustin’s not talking to him, which Evan’s sure is because of something he’s done, even though he doesn’t know it. His mom’s struggling, with money and everything else, but he only really goes home to sleep nowadays and it’s not like she’s ever around for more than a few hours at a time, or it seems that way. He can’t work. His meds are only doing their job about half the time.

Jared’s still there.

They say bad luck comes in threes, except for Evan it’s always been more like fours, or tens, or twenties. Jared should be less of a problem now. He doesn’t spare Evan a second glance when he can help it, and that’s a good thing. That’s meant to be a good thing.

No more Twitter rants about how much he hates him, no more passive aggressive comments whenever he’s around, no sign that he registers Evan’s presence any more than he would a total stranger’s. It shouldn’t hurt, but every time it happens he feels something splinter in his chest.

He can’t even blame Jared, like it’s deliberate. He’s doing everything right. Evan’s the one all hung up on things.

 

* * *

 

 

Evan was probably right to have been avoiding the proper coffee shop chains.

Jared’s sitting slouched in an armchair in the Starbucks just by campus. He’s on his phone, which as far as Evan’s concerned is his default resting position, and he’s not looking up even though Evan’s been staring at him for longer than he probably should. Again.

Evan orders the hot chocolate he was going to order before he’d noticed Jared, fumbles with his change, and when the barista asks for his name it comes out like a lie, all pauses and false-starts. He doesn’t spill the drink, though, which is the important thing, and he makes it all the way to the table without tripping over his own feet.

Jared looks up, then.

“Hi,” Evan says.

“Uh. Hi,” Jared says, frowning and then immediately trying to school his expression into something casual and unremarkable.

“Can I sit here?” Evan asks, because it seems polite even though he’s already put his mug down on the table, worried his nerves would get the best of him. He doesn’t stutter or stumble over his words then, even though this is arguably far more stressful than anything else he could’ve done today. Maybe it’s because talking to Jared still feels weirdly familiar, like shrugging on an old coat you’d stopped wearing years ago but that still remembers the shape of your body.

“Sure,” Jared says, dragging out the sound the way he used to when he was trying to hold back a comment. Evan’s not sure it means the same thing, anymore. But it probably does.

“Thanks,” Evan says.

He sits down opposite Jared and tries to ignore the way his nerves are making his whole body feel like it’s been dropped from somewhere high.

Jared stares at him without saying anything for a long, long time, and Evan drinks his hot chocolate without commenting on it. It’s not comfortable, but it is a silence. The drink feels heavy on Evan’s tongue, and far too hot, but drinking it’s the only thing he can think to do to occupy himself, besides talking, or just watching Jared, and neither of those options seems particularly appealing. Burning the inside of his mouth doesn’t either, but he’s already started on down that path, and it would be a shame to waste all the progress.

“What’s going on, Evan?” Jared asks. He doesn’t sound accusatory, which means that he’s feeling that way but just trying to hide it.

“I just thought…” he starts, trailing off because he hadn’t thought that far ahead, and he hadn’t actually thought about what he was doing at all. It was a split second decision he barely made. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

From Jared’s expression it doesn’t seem much like he believes him, but it’s okay because Evan’s not sure he does either. If there’s a better answer he doesn’t have it, though.

“I’m fine,” Jared says. He frowns, for a second. “Are you?”

“Um,” Evan says, because the long answer is no, he has so, so many problems right now, far too many for him to ever be fine. Fine’s the sort of foreign concept you only read about in textbooks you’re never going to remember the day after.

“I’m okay,” he says instead, because that’s the short answer; that he’s managing, and little more.

“Okay.”

Jared goes back to looking at his phone. It’s a beat up touchscreen one, probably an iPhone, knowing Jared, though Evan’s never had one himself and can’t be sure from the back of the case it’s in. He’s not sure why he hasn’t replaced it yet. Jared was never the type to hang on to anything he could get a better version of.

He's typing rapidly, as always, expression pinched, and Evan can feel his stomach lurch, because he knows he’s saying something about him. He has to be. It’s not just paranoia, or anxiety, this time; it’s Jared, and Evan knows him.

He drinks his hot chocolate.

“What do you want?” Jared asks, blandly, his typing slowing as he glances up. “And none of that ‘to see how you’re doing’ crap. If you think you need to thank me or something - you don’t. Really.”

“No,” Evan says, “I, uh. Well. I guess I did sort of want to thank you, but that isn’t - I wouldn’t have bothered coming over here if it was just that, because, you know. But I thought maybe we could talk, I guess. I don’t really know why I thought that.”

“I don’t really know why you thought that either,” Jared says.

It’s nothing more than a throwaway comment, a slight variation on one of the replies Jared has doubtless mapped out in his head already, because he still navigates conversations like they’re something to be won. It shouldn’t hurt, should barely even register as a reply rather than a reflex. It’s meaningless.

Something in Evan’s chest feels the kind of cold that gets painful if you think about it too long, all sharp. It doesn’t hurt yet. But it could, and it probably will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :p
> 
> ...so. it's been a while. as always this was looked over by [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/), to whom i am ever grateful. thank you all for sticking with me!


	12. Chapter 12

 “Is that - should I go?” Evan asks, because he doesn’t really know what the protocol is for a situation like this. Or, he does, but according to common courtesy he should never have approached Jared in the first place, so it’s not like he can fall back on that without feeling guilty.

Jared doesn’t say anything, goes back to whatever it was he was doing on his phone before Evan had interrupted him. It’s a dismissal, sure, but it’s not explicit - which is Jared’s mistake, because if Evan’s willing to push the limits of anyone, it’s him. Call it an old habit.

It’s not quiet in the coffee shop, not really - if Evan gives it any more than just his passive attention he can pick out the conversation the table next to him is having, the orders new customers are making, the familiar buzz of other people existing around him. Jared is silent, though, and despite the background noise every time he taps out a letter and his nail hits the screen Evan hears it amplified ten times over.

He pulls his own phone out of his pocket so he can look like he’s doing something (he can only drink so much of his hot chocolate before it’s gone, and he no longer has an excuse to sit there), scrolling through Facebook messages he’s already read. He’s certain Jared knows what’s going on - Evan’s never been popular enough that he has to keep up with conversations, to constantly have to respond to people. Evan’s existence is a quiet, unobtrusive one. Exceptions aside.

He could make a career out of faux-nonchalantly staring at the same few lines of text for an extended period of time. He’s practiced at pretending he’s just being ignored because he’s busy, rather than because no-one would be interested in him anyway.

When he switches from his Facebook messages to his texts he realizes his mistake, because sure, it means he’s getting some variety in what he’s reading, but he also doesn’t get that many texts. Hardly any at all, actually, which means he hits Jared’s before he’s mentally prepared himself for it. He doesn’t even need to open up their text history to know what’s there, because he’d spent months reading and re-reading them, even when so much time had passed since they’d spoken that he knew there were never going to be any more.

He’d have to scroll up past something like 15 different messages of Jared’s before he got to any of his own.

He doesn’t.

Jared notices him put down his phone, though, hesitantly, and glances up. He looks suddenly tired, even though no time has passed at all.

“It was a yes,” he says. “Earlier, when you asked if you should go. _Obviously_ it was a yes.”

“Well,” Evan says, playing dumb even though he knows nobody would ever believe it, least of all Jared, “it was - I asked. You didn’t say anything.”

“We aren’t friends, Evan. Not replying to you isn’t an invitation. Just because I can put up with you doesn’t mean that I want you here.”

“I know,” Evan says, stumbling through his words.

He’s tempted to try and argue he’s only sitting with Jared because he has nowhere else to, but it's patently false. There are plenty of empty tables, and even if there weren’t it's not like he had to sit down, really. If he hadn’t seen Jared he probably wouldn’t have bothered - it was rarely worth the nervous energy that would build anytime he felt like he was taking up space that wasn’t his.

Jared certainly wouldn’t have sat with Evan, if he’d had the choice. Evan can’t even really rationalize the whole thing to himself, let alone another person. He’s got nothing but excuses.

Jared reaches for his drink but doesn’t take a sip, just curls his hands around the mug and pulls it towards him. Evan can hear him kick his bag as he shuffles his feet. He keeps shooting Evan looks, like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing, like he’s waiting for some kind of cue.

They sit at a stalemate for a good minute, Evan’s brain running too slowly to process everything. It’s weird how certain things just make him stall like that, make everything seize up. It doesn’t feel fair. Interacting with people is hard enough without him suddenly losing all ability to function.

Evan continues to say nothing, and he watches as Jared’s mouth curves down just a little, like he might have been waiting for something; that whatever it was he didn’t get it.

Jared doesn’t say goodbye when he gets up to leave, suddenly, just shoves his laptop into his rucksack and throws it over his shoulder like it’s a kind of performance art. He walks like he’s scared of being chased. He doesn’t look back, but his shoulders twitch slightly like he wants to.

Evan stays sat at the table by himself, because leaving just because Jared has seems wrong somehow. No one else is watching, but he’s still scared they might get the wrong idea.

The word sorry sits heavy on his tongue, but he’s not sure that’s what Jared had been after anyway.

 

* * *

 

There’s no good reason for Evan to be forcing anything with Jared. He’d thought it was going to be a weird, one-off thing (he still hopes it will be, but suspects it probably won’t). He’d thought he was proving a point to himself, maybe, that Jared was still an asshole; that there was no relationship left to salvage. That him being there at the party was just an honest mistake. That he never actually wanted to help.

If he was anyone else he’d have taken the coffee shop thing as proof of just that. Jared’s always been defensive, though, and while it might have been a weak excuse at the time it was true he’d never outright dismissed Evan. Maybe it’s stupid to take that as something worth being optimistic about. Evan always feels stupid when he thinks about Jared.

He doesn’t want to be friends with him again. That much he knows.

But it feels like he needs something - some kind of resolution. It was okay back when Jared was bullying him (because that’s the best way Evan can think to describe it, even though it wasn’t that at all, really), because it felt like everything was said and done. Jared hated him, and Evan hated him right back, and nothing they’d had before that mattered. Now it feels like he’s missing something.

Jared shouldn’t have helped. He should have seen Evan and left, walked away - it wouldn’t have been right, but Evan would almost have forgiven him for it. Because it wasn’t like helping him was just a good deed for a stranger, something to do and forget about.

He would have done the same, though, if he could. He’s never wanted to see Jared suffer, not in a way he didn’t deserve.

It’s a moot point either way - Jared would never have been in Evan’s position. His bad nights are entirely different, were even back then, and god only knows what they’ve become since. Evan’s not sure there’s any straightforward way he could have dealt with something like that.

 

* * *

 

“Go away,” Jared says, when Evan takes a seat across from him at the library.

Evan’s surprised to see him there. He’s surprised he’s there himself, especially without somebody else, but they've all been weirdly busy lately, all kind of distant. Not in a rude way - Evan knows what it feels like to be deliberately avoided or ignored - but busy. Maybe it’s the same with Jared.

“Um,” Evan begins, before Jared looks up at him properly, more than just the irritated glance he’d gotten at first. Evan hesitates, then, and it’s enough of a pause to give him time to cut in.

“I don’t know what you think’s going on here,” Jared says, making a vague gesture between them, “but it’s not.” He looks less convinced than he sounds.

Jared seems a little strung tight, Evan thinks. The papers in front of him are crisscrossed with lines, equations he’s run through and immediately discarded. He’s not sure how much computer science can be done without a computer, but Jared seems like he’s been trying to do all of it at once.

“I don’t think anything’s going on,” Evan says.

It’s true, but Jared just looks more frustrated. He hits the backspace key on his computer a good dozen times, hard, and then stops, takes his hands off the keys and crosses his arms.

“Okay, great. So you just decided to sit here for no reason, like you just decided you were going to sit at my table last week? Are you going to _decide_ to start coming to my lectures next? My dorm room?”

“I didn’t realize it was such a big deal,” Evan says.

“Because nothing’s a big deal to you!” Jared snaps. He goes quiet after, and Evan just stares.

“What?”

He’s hyper conscious of the fact that they’re in a library, that they’re talking really loud and he definitely shouldn’t be, but for some reason he feels more worried about what Jared’s going to say next than the fact they’re probably going to get kicked out if something doesn’t change in the next few seconds.

“Whatever,” Jared says, and he’s already sliding out of his seat before Evan has a chance to respond, shuffling his papers into a stack.

His nails are short like he’s been biting them. Evan had thought he’d dropped that habit a long time ago.

Jared pulls his hands away when he notices Evan watching, shoves them in his pockets. He doesn’t move to pick up any of his scattered pens after that, even though he keeps staring at them like he means to.

“It’s okay,” Evan says, standing up again and then backing way just a little, hands raised placatingly. He wants to make himself small. “I’ll go, it’s okay. Sorry.”

He doesn’t need to be in the library, really. His friends might be busy but he can always go home. There are always places to go.

Jared rolls his eyes but sits back down, eventually, and Evan finds himself stuck in place staring for a minute before he can work up the courage to head back out the way he came. When he does, he keeps his head down.

Something about the whole interaction leaves him feeling dirty hours later.

 

* * *

 

It’s not that Evan starts seeking Jared out. That’s what he keeps telling himself - that it’s not intentional, that he’s not trying anything. It’s just happening organically.

The truth is less forgiving. He really isn’t trying to stake him out or anything - he hasn’t memorized Jared’s schedule, doesn’t even know where he lives nowadays. Hell, he hasn’t so much as glanced at any of Jared’s numerous social media profiles in weeks. But he doesn’t avoid the places he used to, and maybe he spends a little longer hanging around the science block after his lectures than he needs to. He’s suggested his next coffee meet with Kendall could be on campus. She hasn’t said anything yet, but Evan knows she’s read the message.

It’s becoming a habit.

It’s not one he can keep up, either - even the thought of talking to Jared makes him nervous, makes his heart beat twenty times faster and his palms sweat awfully. Makes him feel like a dumb kid all over again.

He wants to tell his mom about it. She couldn’t help, would probably be too pleased he’d spoken to Jared at all to properly understand exactly why it wasn’t that straightforward, but he still wants to tell her, the same way he’s wanted to tell her everything. He has friends now, but sometimes it feels like she’s the only safe place he’s ever certain of.

He could tell Alana. They don’t talk every day, but they talk every week or so, pretty regularly. It’s still hard, and Evan’s still not sure if they’re only talking because he feels like he owes her something, but they talk.

Alana knows Jared, too, as much as anyone from their high school other than Evan did. Alana also knows Evan, and she knows he probably deserves some of this. So it’s not an easy sell.

He messages her anyway, because he feels like he sort of needs to be criticized right now.

 **Evan Hansen  
** hi alana. i hope things are going ok at college  
i know you’re probably sick of me talking about him but i saw jared the other day and i don’t know who else to talk to  
about him i mean  
we don’t have to though

Alana’s always been quick to reply to him. He’s not sure if that means she gets so many messages she’s always replying to someone about something, or if she gets so few that she’s glad to have something to say when she does. If you’d asked him a year ago he’d have said the former. Now he’s not so sure.

 **Alana Beck  
** Hi Evan!  
Things are going well. Me and a couple of other people are organizing a protest march next week for fossil fuel divestment, so that’s fun.  
Or, not fun, but it’s exciting. And important.

There’s a couple of minutes where Alana doesn’t say anything more, but in Evan’s experience that just means she’s forgotten whatever it was he’d been saying. She follows up a second later.

 **Alana Beck  
** I don’t mind talking about Jared. You should know that I’ve been talking to him too, though, and I wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.  
But he’s not said anything bad about you! He hasn’t mentioned you at all lately.  
I think maybe he’s busy.

Evan stares at the screen, watches the text cursor blink calmly. He wants to shut the whole laptop down out of spite, ignore everything else Alana has to say even though none of this is her fault at all. Jared’s always been better at making friends than he has. It only makes sense that the two of them would have worked it out already.

Only makes sense that Jared would have fixed things with everyone but Evan.

 **Evan Hansen  
** oh, okay 

He tries to think of something more to say, tries desperately to follow up the couple of words he’s sent with anything at all, but he _can’t_. He wants to apologize but he doesn’t even know how to say that - how to explain. It’s not her fault.

 **Alana Beck  
** Are you okay, Evan?  
I hope I didn’t do something to make you upset.

 **Evan Hansen  
** no it’s okay 

It takes him a minute, but it’s easy once he gets going. These sort of lies have never been hard.

 **Evan Hansen  
** i just wasn’t expecting it  
but it’s fine, i didn’t know you and jared were friends!  
sorry i assumed. i think i probably just got ahead of myself haha  
so don’t worry about it  
i’ll talk to you soon? i just remembered i have a ton of reading left to do for this lecture tomorrow 

 **Alana Beck  
** That’s okay.  
But you know if it’s not okay, that’s okay too, right?

Evan doesn’t reply to that one. Alana doesn’t say anything else either, though, like she’d anticipated that, so maybe she knows him better than he thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas! beta'd by [the lovely nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/) as per usual :")
> 
> if you left a comment last chapter please know i cried at like all of them. you are all so, so kind. i am, as always over on [tumblr](http://goldspill.tumblr.com) if you want to talk or just watch me post incessantly about this fic
> 
> love u all always <3


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **tw's in the end notes ******

It’s getting colder out. Not so cold that Evan’s started wearing gloves or anything (in part because that would mean actually buying some - the only pair he owns have started wearing through at the fingertips) but enough that he’s got a coat with him more often than not. Time moves fast and slow all at once. Days dragging on like they’re physically painful, and all his  free time bleeding together so it feels like he never has any of it left. He barely has pause to think about all the things he doesn’t want to, but he still manages. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier, and he knows that’s having a negative effect on everything else in his life, but he can’t afford a sun-lamp, or more therapy appointments. He’s coping the only way he knows how, and that’s by ignoring it until it goes away. He’s past it.

He stopped talking to Alana. At first he told himself it was only a temporary thing, that it was because he needed time to process the fact that she and Jared were maybe-friends. But it’s been a week, now, and he’d feel terrible starting up a conversation with her again, so he’s pretty sure it’s going to go on indefinitely. She’s only sent him a handful of messages since. Maybe she’d been planning on giving up on him anyway. 

It’s cruel. It’s not true. The thought makes it easier to live with the fact that he’s really the one giving up, though.

He’s good at ignoring people when they reach out to him. Well practiced. He’s a bad friend, if he can even call himself one, not just to Alana but in general. It’s hard, harder than anyone else seems to realize, dealing with other people. There are so many outside factors, things he can’t control. It’s terrifying. Jared was the only person it was ever easy to be friends with, he wants to tell people, and look what became of that. As if there’s anything left to look at.

If Evan were better at compartmentalizing it might be okay, the whole Alana thing, but he’s not. He’s incapable of separating things out and managing them, the fact that she’s in contact with Jared feels like a personal attack. He doesn’t know how to stop feeling like everything’s about him. It’s like an unintentional kind of self-importance, where he doesn’t feel special, he doesn’t feel abnormally  _ good _ \- just like everything bad, if it’s happening, is happening to him. Maybe it’s a victim complex.

He needs to talk to someone, he tells himself every time he starts spiralling. He needs to get out of town. He needs to do something, anything to make himself feel like there’s more out there - that what’s happening right now doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t.

Evan’s not sure why he’s suddenly acting like this. No one’s started being horrible to him. His life is basically the same as it was a week ago, and last week was basically the same as the week before that. It’s pedestrian. Nothing’s changed, which is why it’s so difficult to believe he’s allowed to feel bad about it.

He draws spirals in the corner of his notebook, and broods.

He had the coffee meet with Kendall on campus instead of in the Starbucks they usually go to, eventually, after some prodding. It didn’t amount to much. Jared wasn’t there - Evan hasn’t caught even the briefest sight of him lately. He and Kendall end up having the same conversation they’ve been having for months, and if the brief mention of Jared last time had changed anything it didn’t carry over. It’s like nothing is sticking. Evan doesn’t have the words to explain why everything’s suddenly difficult.

He should see the university counselor, he knows he should, but none of his problems seem big enough for that. Maybe they used to be, but he doesn’t have an excuse anymore, he doesn’t have any horrible life events he needs to get over, any reason to be the way he is. There’s no good explanation for the way he’s feeling, other than that he deserves it. And he doesn’t want to be told he deserves it. 

 

* * *

 

Evan packs himself a lunch every day, because it’s cheaper and it means he doesn’t have to sit alone in one of the cafes on campus - he just sits outside on a bench until he’s finished eating instead, and then uses his phone until his lectures start up again, or he runs out of charge. If he runs out of charge he walks around and pretends he’s just waiting for his friends to arrive. That he’s going to have company, if you just wait for a second.

* * *

 

 

It’s a mistake, when Evan decides he’s going to visit the state park again one weekend. He tells his mom he’s going to campus to study, when she asks, because even though it’s not a big deal he knows she’d kick up a fuss about it if he told her the truth. She doesn’t talk to any of his friends, though, so she’s not going to find out, and the only other person who’d know to care wouldn’t.

The weather makes it feel more daunting. It’s quiet, probably because few other people care to be outdoors in the approach to winter. He wishes it wasn’t. If there were other people there, if it felt like people were noticing him, even if they didn’t care that he was there, he would feel safer, or he wants to believe that. 

He feels like he hasn’t spoken a word in days. He has, of course, to his mom, and then Dustin and Atif, because they still make it to their lectures if nothing else, and to a handful of other people because he had to, to function - the bus driver, the guy at the coffee shop, the dude who delivered his mom’s Amazon order the other day. Still, it feels like the rest of the world got turned off a little while ago, and he’s only just noticing that no one else is around. 

He flexes his fingers a little as he walks, trying to preemptively ease the ache the cold’s bound to cause in his joints, and because it gives him something to do that isn’t thinking about how bad everything seems. He needs to cut his nails. Every time he curls his hands into fists he feels them digging into his skin. 

The trees are tall. They’ve always been tall (that was rather the point, he thinks), but now they’re looming above him in a way that makes him feel completely insignificant. If he looks up for more than a few seconds he starts to feel dizzy. He looks down at the ground instead, keeps walking. He’s got no destination in mind, but he’ll get there eventually anyway.

He’s not used to feeling this kind of bad, nowadays. Coming here was a mistake, but he’d known that the second he’d begun considering it. At the time it had made him feel a queasy kind of excitement, instead of the cold, dead discomfort that sits low in his gut now. It’s an awful truth, that sometimes he wants so badly to make himself feel worse. 

There’s a type of sad you can be, Evan’s come to learn, where the feeling just wants to be bigger.  And sometimes you let it, because it’s easier, or because it feels good, or because if you’re going to be sad at all you might as well be worse.

So: it feels terrible. That’s part of why he’s letting it happen.

He stops, after another ten minutes or so of walking. The trees have started opening up a little overhead, and the grass stretches out in front of him, the little gravel path petering away into nothingness. The sun is warm on his face, despite everything. 

Everything’s muted, all the colors just a little drab, just a little lifeless. He watches the grass shake a little as the wind picks up again. 

This should be the moment of some great revelation, he thinks. This is the big movie parallel, where he stands and looks back on where he’s come from, the time before, and realises how much has changed. Maybe he’s okay now, and this is where he recognises just how much better everything is, now.

Evan watches the horizon for a long time, and then he turns away and walks back to the bus stop. He doesn’t feel much of anything.

 

* * *

 

“Pass me a pen?” Atif asks from across the table.

They’re in the library. It turns out that it’s actually pretty helpful, studying there, when Evan stops letting himself think about Jared. It takes a while, each time, a good ten minutes or so before he gives up on hoping he might see him. He’s stopped lying to himself that he doesn’t want to. But the library’s a good distraction, and there are always people around, even if they never talk. It’s an easy way to convince himself he isn’t lonely.

Evan doesn’t reply to the request, but wordlessly passes one over to him with a thumbs up and a smile, just a little tight around the edges. 

Atif makes a note of some sort on the edge of his notebook, in a shorthand Evan can’t quite understand, and then passes it back over. Atif has a laptop, so why he needs to make notes on paper Evan’s not sure, but they’re in a library, so he isn’t going to start asking questions. 

To be fair, the library isn’t really all that concerned with the silence thing, in Evan’s experience, and even if it was there’s just so much space it would be impossible to keep everyone from talking. It’s probably not worth the effort for them. But Evan’s grown up being told you shouldn’t speak in them, and it keeps him holding his tongue despite how reality might differ.

He’s trying to focus, but they’ve been sat there for about an hour, now, and his interest in the article he’s meant to be reading is waning. He’s gotten through two already, and there’s only so much literature on biogeochemical cycles he can bear to read in a day.

Atif stretches his arms out over his head in an imitation of a yawn, and then pushes his laptop forward a little, so he can slump forward onto the table. He watches Evan, for a second, and Evan’s typing slips. He misses a few keys, has to backspace briefly and then retypes the same word three times before giving up.

“Are you finished?” Evan asks. “You don’t have to stay if you have. I’m okay just working by myself.”

“No,” Atif says, “I just need a break, you know? We haven’t hung out in a while.”

Evan hums an agreement and tries to school his expression into something that doesn’t betray his irritation. It’s not Atif’s fault. It’s never anyone else’s fault.

“Did you - so, you want to do something, then?”

“Sure,” Atif says, spinning a pen between his fingers. He drops it, after a second, furrowing his brow a little. “I’ll get that one day.”

“So like. Lunch?” Evan tries. He hates being the one to make suggestions, but it’d be even worse for him to just sit there saying nothing.

“Yeah,” Atif says, “if you don’t have other plans. The work can wait, and I have all day.”

Evan nods his agreement, saves the file he’d had open for his notes, and closes his tabs. He doesn’t like shutting his laptop while he still has stuff open. It’s like anyone could just pick it up and see what he’d been doing. Not that he ever does anything on his laptop, really, he’s just hyper-conscious of his space. It’s probably weird.

He piles the rest of his stuff in his backpack and stands, trailing after Atif as he heads down the stairs, and outside. 

“Any preferences?” Atif asks.

When Evan doesn’t reply he shrugs, and just starts walking. Evan follows him. It’s nice to know that they’re close enough for it to not be weird that Evan doesn’t want to offer up any suggestions. He’s not good at options. 

They end up in a sandwich shop slash cafe thing - Atif says something about them doing good paninis at lunch, and Evan just nods along. They get a table in the back corner, where Evan doesn’t have to worry about people walking behind him. He’s pretty good at managing some of the weirder things that set off his anxiety, now that he’s older, but it’s easy to fall back into old habits, especially when he’s kind of on-edge. 

“A while ago,” Atif begins, slowly, “I asked if you wanted to talk.”

He speaks in guarded tones, like he’s thinking about every word he’s saying, like Evan’s going to lash out, or argue. Evan’s not sure exactly what it is that’s giving Atif that impression, that he needs to be careful, but when he thinks about it he can feel a growing ache in his jaw, where he’s clenching it. His palms are starting to get just a bit too warm.

“Okay,” Evan says, “I don’t, um - so you want to talk?”

Atif pauses, fiddles with the parchment paper his sandwich was wrapped in. It’s the closest thing to nervous Evan’s ever seen from him.

“You said, back then, that you wanted to. And it’s just that it’s been a while, and I don’t think you’ve talked to anyone, about any of it.”

Evan grimaces. 

“I have other friends,” he says. 

“I know, that’s not what I’m saying. I just don’t get the impression you’ve said anything to them either. I’m not trying to push.”

Evan moves his hands from the table, so he can curl them up in the fabric of his shirt, so Atif won’t see the way his fingers are nervously flexing. It’s not an accusation. Atif’s only trying to be a good friend.

Evan weighs up his options. The seat he’s sitting in is a little hard, digging into his back when he leans back, and he tries to concentrate on that, instead of how scared he is. His bag is sitting on the floor by his feet, and he moves a little so his shoe is pressed up against it, just so he’d notice if anyone tried to steal it. His laptop’s the most expensive thing he owns, and even though he knows it’s not going to happen he wants to prepare for the worst case scenario.

“Okay,” Evan says, trying to bracket the words between the conscious movements he’s making, so they feel rehearsed, so he can pretend it’s not a commitment he’s making, “I can - I’ll try.”

“Great!” Atif says, and he looks so genuinely pleased that Evan feels immediately overcome with guilt.

“You know Jared,” he says, more a statement than a question. “Well, um, I don’t - I’m not sure how much I’ve told you already... so I guess I’ll just start from the beginning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw's for negative thoughts associated with depression throughout the chapter, and a brief acknowledgement of evan's suicide attempt when he's in the park
> 
> give your thanks to [nothingunrealistic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/) for beta'ing, as usual
> 
> sorry this took so long.. but we're getting there folks. i swear. i'm on [tumblr](https://goldspill.tumblr.com) and i'm currently doing fic prompts if you want to send requests. love u all. ALSO i'm trying to actually reply to comments now to prove i do, in fact, read them all. and then cry. thank you if you'd ever left one before


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